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A requiem for
health care
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By
JIM STREET Ed
& Pub Remember when
we had the best health care system in the world? Remember when people came
here from all over the world to get healthcare because they couldn’t get it
at home? That’s all
gone and now we’ll have to go some-where else to get ours. But where? Did the
Congress bring about ”Armageddon" with its narrow passage of the
healthcare bill Sunday as House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio warned
Saturday. Well, not quite.
But he may be right that the action could very well “ruin our country.” OPINION His
impassioned speech moments before the 219-212 vote Sunday night should have
convinced enough of his colleagues to change their minds and prevent this
catastrophe. It didn’t. Speaker Nancy
Pelosi followed with a pathetic plea full of wishful thinking and short of
facts. But most Democrats had already made up their minds. Yes,
Democrats. There was not a single Republican vote in favor of the
now-House-passed Senate bill that also passed the Senate sans Republican
support in December. The
“reconciliation” measure passed a few moments after the House action Sunday,
which is supposed to “fix” the things the House didn’t like about the Senate
bill. But what is
passed has been signed and is the “law of the land.” If the “fix” goes
through, fine. If not, that little trick backfired on House Democrats. Bart Stupak of
Michigan, who headed a coalition of Democrats who worried the bill would
allow federal funding for abortions, sold out to a piece of paper signed by
President Obama that federal funding would not be used for that. But most
agreed an executive order would not stand up to a challenge and was
essentially “useless” in preventing abortion funding. It’s not all
over for us. We will still be able to work at our chosen profession, worship
where we please and enjoy travel, fine dining and entertainment and it will
take years to fully implement it. But the health care system that has been
the envy of the world will soon be gone. Why? Because
the statists that now control our Congress and White House and want to make
the US more like European socialist states believe healthcare, as Pelosi put
it, “is a right, not a privilege.” Yes, health
care is a “right” in that if I want to pay a doctor to make me feel better,
no one can take that away. But it is not a right in that you have to pay for
it if I can’t – or don’t want to. Well, now it
is. The healthcare
companies were the main target of this bill. Some people hated them because
they saw their premiums rising and coverage dropped for various reasons. They
wanted Congress to make it better for them. And some of
the insurance companies did not do themselves any favors. Companies like
Anthem Blue Cross raising rates significantly just a few weeks before the
debate last weekend didn’t help. At all. Insurance, as
we have said repeatedly in this space, is exactly the wrong way to pay for
healthcare. But now we all have to have health insurance – whether we want it
or not. Almost lost in
the debate is the addition of 15,000 to 17,000 brand new agents for the
Internal Revenue Service to police the new bill. If you liked
the IRS poring over your tax forms every year, you’ll love them prying into
your every waking moment making sure your use the “right” insurance company. Congress
hasn’t yet appropriated the $10 billion or so to pay for those new agents.
Stick around. It’s coming. Also all but
lost has been the cost to the states, some of which are facing bankruptcy and
none are very healthy. Those are just
a couple of the scary things in a bill that runs to 2,700 pages plus more
than 150 pages in the “reconciliation” bill. The entire US
Constitution on which this nation was based runs to 4,440 words. At about 300
words to a page like a typical novel, that’s fewer than 15 pages. What in the
name of all that’s holy for do you need 855 million words of legalese for? And the
Obama/Reid/Pelosi gang has indicated they are just starting their makeover. Is there any
hope? Not much. Many feel the
Democrats were so out of touch with their constituents, a real shift to a
Republican Congress is very likely, much like the gain of 54 US House seats
in 1994 – after another effort at “healthcare reform” failed. But we’ll
still have a Democrat in the White House and a bill to roll back the mess is
not likely. It could take years to repair the damage, if ever. Attorneys
general from several states, including Texas, are suing over the provisions
forcing people to buy health insurance. Where in the
Constitution does it give the government that power? But a lot of
things that should have been ruled unconstitutional haven’t been. Our tilt to
the left has been going on since Social Security came on the scene in 1935,
the same year I did. Things do not
look promising from here. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ObamaCare,
a big lie By
HOWARD RICH Chairman of
Americans for Limited Government Lost amid the
partisan sniping and procedural jousting over the passage of
"Obamacare" is a fundamental, unavoidable hypocrisy – one that's
worth unmasking as Washington politicians continue to ignore the will of the
American people and plunge our nation deeper into full-blown socialism. President
Barack Obama and his Congressional allies are spending money that they know
we don't have on a program that they know isn't going to work – all in an
effort to expand government's control over the private sector and its reach
into the private lives of American citizens. Sound a bit
conspiratorial? OPINION It's not – at
least not when you turn down the partisan rhetoric – on both sides of the
debate – and start examining what this monstrosity actually does. "ObamaCare
is really about who commands the country's medical resources," an
editorial in The Wall Street Journal noted the day before the legislation was
passed. "It
vastly accelerates the march toward a totally state-driven system, in
contrast to reforms that would fix today's distorted status quo by putting
consumers in control," the Journal wrote. With
government already purchasing nearly half of all health care services in
America – a system that's rampant with fraud and anti-competitive
price-fixing – just who did you think was responsible for the "distorted
status quo" that Obamacare ostensibly seeks to correct? Here's a hint
– it's not those "evil" insurance companies, which will be
receiving nearly a half-trillion dollars in "Obamacare" subsidies. Consistent
with the core fallacy of other recent socialist misadventures – like former
President George Bush's TARP bailout or Obama's so-called
"stimulus" – Washington politicians are once again attempting to
solve problems that have been exacerbated by excessive government
interventionism with additional government interventionism, "dumping
buckets of water on the head of a drowning victim," if you will. Even though
America can't even begin to afford its current entitlement obligations,
Washington's answer is to create yet another new entitlement program –
something that Republicans who voted in favor of Bush's prescription drug
benefit know all about. And even as
Medicare and Medicaid have failed spectacularly – and expensively – to
provide cost-effective health care, Obama and his allies are using this
failure as an excuse to dramatically escalate their "government knows
best" approach to include individual mandates and huge fines for
families and small businesses who fail to comply. It's a power
grab, pure and simple. And a money grab, which is why "Obamacare"
spends $10 billion to hire 17,000 new tax collectors at the IRS to rake in
billions of dollars from America's newly-created class of "illegally
uninsured" citizens. That hardly
sounds like a plan built around "expanding coverage," does it? Obviously
"Obamacare" isn't going to reduce the deficit either. In fact when
the actual cost of just one of the variables ignored by the Congressional
Budget Office is calculated into the legislation, its price tag soars by
nearly $208 billion, putting it $59 billion in the red. Even
"Obamacare's" worst-case deficit projections are likely to prove
overly-optimistic. In 1965, for
example, government accountants predicted that the hospital insurance portion
of Medicaid would cost $9 billion by 1990. It wound up costing $63 billion. Even after
adjusting for inflation, that's still twice as expensive as the government
originally estimated. Earlier this
month, The New York Times – ostensibly seeking to build momentum for
universal coverage – published a story highlighting the un-sustain-ability of
Medicaid. The story
revealed that last year, while state governments were relying on bailout
money to fund skyrocketing growth rates, the program added 3.3 million new
members – raising its total enrollment to 47 million. It is going
broke, clearly, although that didn't stop Obama and his Congressional allies
from raiding $202 billion from its coffers – as well as $53 billion from
Social Security – to make their plan appear deficit neutral. And that may
be the ultimate irony of "Obamacare" – that it is funding
tomorrow's big government obligations with the failed promises of yesterday. Hannibal
born for music “If people could do what they were born to
do, there would be less tension in the world.” Those words were spoken by Hannibal Lecumbe
of Bastrop, a trumpet player and composer of musical African portraits. He lives on
land his great grandfather bought a few years after he escaped from
slavery. When he’s not
performing, Hannibal enjoys staying home with his family and tending his
garden. He creates
music for orchestras, choirs, string quartets and solo viola works. He has composed music and played his
trumpet for symphony orchestras in Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and other
places in the US and Europe. Some critics have compared him to Miles
Davis. I had the privilege of visiting with Hannibal, a man with a passion
for what he does. He grew up in
the cotton patch and was greatly influenced by it. “I was born a
musician,” he told me. “I realized it when I was six years old in the cotton
field in Elgin, Texas. “I was demoted
from picking in the field to being the water boy because it was too hot and
by then my hands were bleeding a lot from being cut,” he said. “So they
bandaged my hands and put me under the wagon and told me ‘just bring water’
to them. “On this day
in particular, when we got to the field early in the morning, everyone was
talking about things that were going on in the community, like who got
married, who ran off with whose husband or wife and who was pregnant, those
kind of things,” Hannibal said. “And then, as it got to be around one
o’clock, the sun became an enemy. “People began
singing,” he said. “And I saw the effect it had on their body. And I wanted
so much to help them because you could see the heat radiating like spirals
from the ground and from their bodies.
It was as though they were baking, which literally they were. “And all of a
sudden my grandfather would start this prayer and he let out this song.” At this point,
Hannibal started to sing the words his grandfather sang. “I love the
Lord, He heard my cry,” Hannibal sang. “And everybody would respond, singing
those same words in a slow rhythm and I got chills. I still get chills when I
remember that day. “And so I said
‘I’ll help them.’ I ran out with a
bucket of water,” he said. “On this day they were so immersed in that power
they threw the water in the air. The
water was of no use to them. It wasn’t what they needed. “It was the
music,” Hannibal said. “When I was
thirteen my mother bought me a trumpet and I played my first solo in public
at the football game,” he said. “And I had that same feeling those people had
in that cotton patch in Elgin. Then I knew I was born to be a musician. I knew that was my path.” Hannibal was
commissioned by the Detroit Symphony to do a musical tribute to Rosa Parks,
the mother of the modern day civil rights movement. “I’m happy to
have been chosen to have that music come through me,” he said. “Some musical
sections depict what I felt in that cotton field that day. “I used that
sensibility in the opening section of the piece,” Hannibal said. “A critic
called the music ‘shimmering squalls of expression.’ It touched him.” Mother’s
last supper She was in her
seventies and having a few health problems. The doctors had been doing tests
and wanted to do surgery. Our family
decided to meet at her home the evening before the surgery and take her out
to eat as a special treat. She would have
nothing to do with it because she wanted to fix a meal for us and did not
want any help. What a meal! All
the favorite dishes our family enjoyed but that would be the last meal we had
together with her. Early the next
morning she went into surgery and had a cardiac arrest. She was revived but
only lived a few more days before she went to be with the Lord. That event
reminded me of something in the Bible. It was the Passover meal Jesus had
with His disciples before he was crucified. They had no
idea that this would be their last meal with Him (Luke 22:15 and 16, John
13:1.) The Passover
was a celebration by the Jewish nation for their miraculous deliverance by
God from slavery in Egypt centuries before. A lamb was
killed and the blood was smeared above and on the sides of the doorway. The lamb’s
blood delivered them just as the blood of Christ delivers us today (1
Corinthians 5:7, Hebrews 9:22.) Remember, it
is by His blood and His stripes that we are healed (John 1:29, 1 Peter 2:24.) See you in
Church next Sunday. Brother J Not
new math - Lunar math Only in the
night sky does a quarter equal a half and a half is full. It's not new math –
it's lunar math. When we see a
first-quarter Moon, it looks like a half moon so perhaps you've wondered why
it's called quarter. Like all
planets, the Moon emits no light but rather reflects sunlight as it orbits
Earth every four weeks – more precisely, 29.53 days. When it's
between Earth and the Sun at “new Moon,” we don't see it as the Sun
illuminates the side facing away from us. A day or so
after new Moon, we begin seeing a slight sliver soon after sunset called a
waxing crescent – waxing because it gets more illuminated each night and
crescent because of its appearance from our perspective. In a week,
when it has traveled a quarter of the way around Earth, its first-quarter
phase looks half-lighted to us. Then for the
next week as the Moon continues to wax, it appears more than half
illuminated, but less than full – a phase called gibbous – Latin for hump. After two
weeks, the Moon has completed half its journey and is on the opposite side of
Earth from the Sun, which illuminates the entire half of the Moon facing us –
called a full Moon. Then for the
next two weeks, the Moon becomes less illuminated each night, called a waning
Moon. During the
third week, it is in its waning gibbous phase on its way to third quarter –
sometimes called last quarter – when it again appears half illuminated. And during the
last week of its sojourn, it is in its waning crescent phase, seen in the
morning sky, until it again reaches new Moon and starts its next cycle. Regardless of
how much of its surface we happen to see at any given time, half of the Moon,
just like half of the Earth, is always illuminated – whichever half is facing
the Sun.
All night
Sunday, March 28, the Moon accompanies Saturn across the sky. Monday
morning, April 29, the full Moon is called Lenten Moon, Sap Moon, Crow Moon,
and Worm Moon. Saturday,
April 3, the gibbous Moon is less than two moonwidths above the star Antares
in the south. Tuesday, April
6, the Moon is at third quarter. Thursday
evening, April 8, Mercury, at its best for this appearance, is to the lower
right of Venus low in the west at dusk. Naked-eye
Planets. The Sun, Moon,
and planets rise in the east and set in the west due to Earth's west-to-east
rotation on its axis. Evenings,
Saturn is low in the east with Mars high overhead. Venus is very low in the
west after sunset. Mornings,
Saturn, low in the west, is now the only morning planet. Stargazer appears every other week, space
permitting. Paul Derrick is an amateur astronomer who lives in Waco. Contact him
at 918 N. 30th, Waco, 76707, (254) 753-6920 or paulderrickwaco@aol.com. See the Stargazer Web site at stargazerpaul.com. |
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