Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Get Involved!
Do your part and email or mail your Senator your thoughts on WHY they should oppose Health Care Reform.
If you don't know how to contact your senator, here is a website that will guide you how to do it:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Being from Virginia, I wrote both my Senators and emailed them my thoughts. It is best to keep things polite, short and professional. Below is the text of my letter to Senator Webb. Feel free to cut and paste and make it your own for your own Senator.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Honorable James Webb
144 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-4604
Dear Senator Webb,
I writing to urge you to oppose efforts currently moving through the House of Representatives and the Senate to Nationalize our Healthcare system under the fig leaf of “so-called” reform. Our country since its founding has been based on the concept of the free-market system, and this system has allowed our nation to have the most advanced and prosperous country on the earth.
The Health Care bills that have been proposed are so monstrously ill-conceived that I and a majority of voters in Virginia believe they will essentially set our country on a path towards socialized medicine. The bills are so flawed as to have no merit for passage, and must be opposed entirely. Whether there is a public option or a trigger, the long-term effect will be the same, and that will be the destruction of the free-market in Health Care and the inevitable decline in quality and innovation that that destruction will bring forth.
The increased governmental regulation on every aspect of our lives is an affront to liberty. The regulations that this will impose on private individuals and small business will cripple and stifle our economy. The enormous costs involved in this proposed system, over a trillion dollars, and most likely to really be many times more that cost, will saddle future generations with unsustainable debt and enslave our children and grandchildren for generations.
The enormous power shift away from individuals and states to the federal government that these bills represent, make a mockery of the founding principles of our Republic. Being a Senator from the great Commonwealth of Virginia, and the home of James Madison, you should be particularly offended by this power grab that is an offense to the founders memory.
I urge you strongly to oppose Health Care reform in whatever form it emerges from conference. Very few votes you will make as a Senator will be more important, and there are legions of Virginians that will remember if you voted for the enlargement of the Federal Government over the wishes of your state, and will hold you accountable at the next election.
Old Cartoon from 1948
http://nationaljuggernaut.blogspot.com/2009/09/this-cartoon-seemed-far-fetched-in-1948.html
The Costs of Medical Care
November 3, 2009
The "Costs" of Medical Care
By Thomas Sowell
We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is "too high"-- either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.
There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes-- or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.
Costs are not reduced simply because you don't pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.
Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive-- but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.
Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance-- and fewer people who can afford it.
Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.
If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors' incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors' offices.
What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.
Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.
Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.
There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them.
The high costs of "defensive medicine"-- expensive tests, medications and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than to help the patients-- could be reduced by not letting lawyers get away with filing frivolous lawsuits.
If a court of law determines that the claims made in such lawsuits are bogus, then those who filed those claims could be forced to reimburse those who have been sued for all their expenses, including their attorneys' fees and the lost time of people who have other things to do. But politicians who get huge campaign contributions from lawyers are not about to pass laws to do this.
Why should they, when it is so much easier just to start a political stampede with fiery rhetoric and glittering promises?
Monday, November 2, 2009
History Favors the Motivated
Tomorrow is election day in Virginia, New Jersey and upstate New York. NOW is the time to begin the long slog to take back America by electing Bob McDonnell Governor in Virginia, Chris Christie Governor in New Jersey and Doug Hoffman congressman in upstate New York. This election is part of a continum that has been building for MONTHS and is a key event in stopping Obama in his tracks.
The Town Hall meetings over the Summer, the 100,000 Tea Party members that marched on Washington on 9-12 and now hopefully a Conservative sweep in the off-year elections is and will send a message loud and clear to congress that Americans are beginning to fight back.
Many people do not realize that almost 100 democratic congressmen are in essentially conservative districts, and approximately 10 democratic Senators are from Red States. YOU have an opportunity tomorrow to send these people a message, clear and loud, that you are PISSED OFF and Taking Names. They need to be spooked into stopping this Socialistic takeover of America, and if enough of us show up tomorrow and vote these candidates into office in high enough numbers, it is possible that the entire Obama Agenda will collapse as endangered Democrats flee the leftist plans their party is trying to shove down our throats.
We lost in 2008 not because our ideas were wrong, or even that most people aren't conservative. Polls consistently show that not only are Conservatives the highest polling idealogical group in the country, there has been a markedly sharp increase in their numbers since Obama was elected. We lost because our "party" lost its way and we were dispirited and unmotivated. Their side on the other hand were highly motivated and that is how they won.
Well, the shoe is on the other foot now, and history has shown repeatedly that History favors the motivated. Well, time to get motivated!!!!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Happy Halloween
31 October and 1 and 2 November are called, colloquially (not officially), "Hallowtide" or the "Days of the Dead" because on these days we pray for or remember those who've left this world.
The days of the dead center around All Saints' Day (also known as All Hallows') on November 1, when we celebrate all the Saints in Heaven. On the day after All Hallows', we remember the saved souls who are in Purgatory being cleansed of the temporal effects of their sins before they can enter Heaven. The day that comes before All Hallows', though, is one on which we unofficially remember the damned and the reality of Hell. The schema, then, for the Days of the Dead looks like this:
31 October:
Hallowe'en: unofficially recalls the souls of the damned. Practices center around the reality of Hell and how to avoid it.
1 November:
All Saints': set aside to officially honor the Church Triumphant. Practices center around recalling our great Saints, including those whose names are unknown to us and, so, are not canonized
2 November:
All Souls': set aside officially to pray for the Church Suffering (the souls in Purgatory). Practices center around praying for the souls in Purgatory, especially our loved ones
The earliest form of All Saints' (or "All Hallows'") was first celebrated in the 300s, but originally took place on 13 May, as it still does in some Eastern Churches. The Feast first commemorated only the martyrs, but came to include all of the Saints by 741. It was transferred to 1 November in 844 when Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel in St. Peter's Basilica to All Saints (so much for the theory that the day was fixed on 1 November because of a bunch of Irish pagans had harvest festivals at that time).
All Souls' has its origins in A.D. 1048 when the Bishop of Cluny decreed that the Benedictines of Cluny pray for the souls in Purgatory on this day. The practice spread until Pope Sylvester II recommended it for the entire Latin Church.
The Vigil of, or evening before, All Hallows' ("Hallows' Eve," or "Hallowe'en") came, in Irish popular piety, to be a day of remembering the dead who are neither in Purgatory or Heaven, but are damned, and these customs spread to many parts of the world. Thus we have the popular focus of Hallowe'en as the reality of Hell, hence its scary character and focus on evil and how to avoid it, the sad fate of the souls of the damned, etc. 1
How, or even whether, to celebrate Hallowe'en is a controversial topic in traditional circles. One hears too often that "Hallowe'en is a pagan holiday" -- an impossibility because "Hallowe'en," as said, means "All Hallows' Evening" which is as Catholic a holiday as one can get. Some say that the holiday actually stems from Samhain, a pagan Celtic celebration, or is Satanic, but this isn't true, either, any more than Christmas "stems from" the Druids' Yule, though popular customs that predated the Church may be involved in our celebrations (it is rather amusing that October 31 is also "Reformation Day" in Protestant circles -- the day to recall Luther's having nailed his 95 Theses to Wittenberg's cathedral door -- but Protestants who reject "Hallowe'en" because pagans used to do things on October 31 don't object to commemorating that event on this day).
Some traditional Catholics, objecting to the definite secularization of the holiday and to the myth that the entire thing is "pagan" to begin with, refuse to celebrate it in any way at all, etc. Other traditional Catholics celebrate it without qualm, though keeping it Catholic and staying far away from some of the ugliness that surrounds the day in the secular world. However one decides to spend the day, it is hoped that the facts are kept straight, and that Catholics refrain from judging other Catholics who decide to celebrate differently.
For those who do want to celebrate Hallowe'en, customs of this day are a mixture of Catholic popular devotions, and French, Irish, and English customs all mixed together. From the French we get the custom of dressing up, which originated during the time of the Black Death when artistic renderings of the dead known as the "Danse Macabre," were popular. These "Dances of Death" were also acted out by people who dressed as the dead. Later, these practices were moved to Hallowe'en when the Irish and French began to intermarry in America.
From the Irish come the carved Jack-o-lanterns, which were originally carved turnips. The legend surrounding the Jack-o-Lantern is this:
There once was an old drunken trickster named Jack, a man known so much for his miserly ways that he was known as "Stingy Jack," He loved making mischief on everyone -- even his own family, even the Devil himself! One day, he tricked Satan into climbing up an apple tree -- but then carved Crosses on the trunk so the Devil couldn't get back down. He bargained with the Evil One, saying he would remove the Crosses only if the Devil would promise not to take his soul to Hell; to this, the Devil agreed.
After Jack died, after many years filled with vice, he went up to the Pearly Gates -- but was told by St. Peter that he was too miserable a creature to see the Face of Almighty God. But when he went to the Gates of Hell, he was reminded that he couldn't enter there, either! So, he was doomed to spend his eternity roaming the earth. The only good thing that happened to him was that the Devil threw him an ember from the burning pits to light his way, an ember he carried inside a hollowed-out, carved turnip.
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