Tonight I board the red-eye train from South Station with my esteemed colleague Angel Fleming. We'll be leaving at 9:45pm and arriving at Union Station in D.C. At 7am. This is of course putting a lot of faith in the efficiency of Amtrak, believe me when I say I am aware of the irony of traveling by one government subsidized failure of a program to get to Washington in order to protest the inception of another.
Michele Bachmann called for this demonstration on the steps of the Capital Building at noontime tomorrow. As she's put it in the press;
"socialized medicine is the crown jewel of socialism. This will change our country forever."
Bachmann spokeswoman Debbee Keller said:
“It’s clear that e-mails and phone calls are being ignored by the majority, so Congresswoman Bachmann is asking anyone who can come to Washington to speak with their representative to do so. Perhaps a reminder of the face-to-face discussions they had at town hall meetings over the summer will help them realize that their constituents need them to vote no on this really bad health care reform bill.”
And speaking on Fox News Senator Bachman referred to her upcoming protest as the
“The Super Bowl of Freedom”
These are grandiose statements I know, but somewhere here in lays the truth. It wasn't until I was speaking with a friend that the point was really driven home. She pointed out that this nation was destined for ruin when those that love the country the most sit on the sidelines while truly nefarious bills like Pelosi's 1990 page disaster are brought to the senate.
Now I'm a history buff, I love listening to old speeches and if you haven't caught on yet, have an soft spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan. His words on Communism in his 1964 endorsements of Barry Goldwater quickly came to mind:
We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.
~Ronald Reagan, 1964
I know this quote is out of context, but the notion of people idly sitting by watching their country falls into the abyss really weighed heavy on my mind. In that instant I made up my mind to go down to Washington and make my voice heard.
Now I've had discussions with friends and family over and over again and I'd like to make my feelings on health care, and more specifically ObamaCare known to all. This may come as a shock to most, but I support reforming our present health care system. I see my health care premiums rising every year just like everyone else and the potential cost of a catastrophic injury is always in the back of my mind.
That being said I cannot support the current house bill, and the concept of ObamaCare as it stands. I believe there are certain systemic failures in our present system that must be addressed first and foremost and very little if anything in the 1990 pages Senator Max Baukus penned addresses them. All this bill does, aside from growing government exponentially, bankrupting the nation and not to mention opening the door to socialism, is shift who the pays the bills.
If our elected leaders truly cared about lowering the cost of health care for all Americans, so that more could afford coverage, they would be discussing: Tort reform (capping malpractice claims), allowing citizens to buy only catastrophic insurance if they so choose, allowing citizens to purchase insurance across state lines and only allowing emergency care for non citizens in our emergency rooms. All of this coupled with rigorous prosecution of anyone found scamming the medicade, medicare system would send health care prices crashing down. If this was the true motive of our government they'd be paying more then lip service to these ideas. Alas this is about growing government and growing government's power over all of us.
So this is why I am traveling to Washington tonight. I cannot speak to the motives of Angel and any of the other protesters who will be attending, but I am willing to bet if you asked them, you'd find certain recurring themes.
As I rap this up I'd like to again leave you with the words of Ronald Reagan from a 1961 address he gave to the perils of socialized medicine. If you have the time and the inclination I invite you to listen to that speech.
“But let’s also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.
This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.
I know how I’d feel, if you my fellow citizens decided that to be an actor, I had to become a government employee and work in a national theater. Take it into your own occupation or that of your husband, all of us can see what happens – once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it is a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go or what they will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell them where he will go to work and what he will do.
In this country of ours, took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in world’s history. The only true revolution. Every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another. But here for the first time in all the thousands of years of man’s relation to man, a little group of the men, the founding fathers - for the first time – established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the God given right and ability to determine our own destiny.
