White House Health Care Reform - It's a Matter of Trust

To follow is a reply to an unsolicited letter/e-mail I received from David Alexrod, President Obama’s senior advisor. It asked me to help promote the President’s health care agenda:

Thank you, Mr. Axelrod, for your letter to encourage me to support President Obama's plan to fundamentally restructure the way Americans obtain their health care. Because you and President Obama seem to have no qualms whatsoever about building yet another big government bureaucracy and increasing our taxes, I’m afraid I cannot support it or your efforts to get it passed into law.

From news reports, and from actually reading portions of the House version of the proposal myself, it is untenable for me to even trust the Obama Administration. Why? Please let me cite a few examples with regard to health care in particular. The President says he is not pushing for a single-payer plan, yet a 2003 video of him addressing the AFL-CIO clearly says differently: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan." And this is not the only video you can find on-line that indicates feelings contrary to what he has said since his polls began to fall. These are not cut and paste jobs. You know what he said. It appears that the President is now simply telling people what he thinks they want to hear. It seems terribly disingenuous.

Additionally, one of the architects of the universal health care plan, Representative John Dingell (D-MI), says that taxpayer-funded abortion is not a part of the bill. Yet, according to Associated Press, taxpayer funded abortion is part of the bill. AP reports: "Health care legislation before Congress would allow a new government-sponsored insurance plan to cover abortions, a decision that would affect millions of women and recast federal policy on the divisive issue." Which is it?

President Obama also pledged several times during the campaign and after his election that there would be no middle-class tax increases, yet your spokespeople say it is a very real possibility that taxes will increase on the middle class to help pay for this gargantuan proposal. In fact, tobacco taxes signed into law earlier this year did effectively already break his promise.

Liberals now describe opponents of Obama’s health care proposal who show up at town hall meetings with their congressional representatives as "mobs," "brown shirts" and "astroturf" hired by insurance companies and partisan operatives. It seems that there is not even one iota of consideration that these people could be regular American citizens — constituents of these very same lawmakers — who have real concerns about this proposal and the speed at which you want to push it through. Mr. Axelrod, when I attend a local town hall meeting to voice my concerns and ask questions, it is offensive that I do so already being branded as some kind of kook or hired mouthpiece.

Most disturbing to me is that our president, without blowback from Blue Dog Democrats, would have signed this bill after only three weeks of consideration in Congress! Here again was a Congress and a President passing a huge government bill, a trillion dollars worth of red tape, questionable policies, confusing language and government encroachment into the private sector that nobody had even read!

Lastly, while there might be some misinformation out there, and if I had the opportunity to actually report something "fishy" — as you have called on Americans to do — I would report the conduct and contradictions of the Obama Administration in trying to pass this monstrous government intrusion into health care as supremely "fishy." Quite frankly, it stinks.

Mr. Axelrod, count me out of supporting yet another trillion-dollar proposal from the Obama Administration. I don't trust you.

IF YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT

IF YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT

If you're a Democrat, tell your reps to start speaking the truth and quit smearing sincere Americans.

You've pooh-poohed and marginalized the Tea Party people. They are just concerned citizens -- concerned like our patriotic founders about high taxation and unresponsive government.

Likewise, health reform Town Hall protests are not coming from organized subsidized "mobs," as you call them, but from moms, dads, veterans, college students, plumbers, painters, senior citizens and other Americans who -- unlike most of Congress -- are reading this rush-to-pass-by-August Health Reform Bill, and finding some disturbing elements in this 1000 plus page document. These Americans simply disagree with your assessment and your urgency to pass a bill that could send us into bankruptcy and inch us closer to socialism.

Quit vilifying opposition to the Obama health reform plan. Speaker Palosi says the protesting Town Hallers are "Astroturfing." If you don't know what that is, check out the bio on Obama's main man, David Axelrod, who some say is an expert at Astroturfing. Senator Boxer says the protestors are dressed too nicely -- that they must be hired by Republicans or insurance companies. And now the White House wants people to report "fishy" information (or misinformation as you call it) to a government web site. Oh yes, don't forget to give the name, address, and other pertinent data about the source of this "fishy" information. And what's this? You're sending union reps (some call them thugs) to the Town Hall meetings, crowding out those who disagree with the bill...even beating up a black guy, using racial slurs against him, and sending him to the hospital. No, this wasn't the black Harvard professor, President Obama -- just a few union thugs "acting stupidly."

So tell me, Dems, is your strategy to muscle the bill through, sneak it through, slip it through, rush it through without allowing the light of examination to check out what's really in it?

I believe it's time for you to face the music: Your words, your trillion-dollar bills, your spend-spend-spend ideas, your tax-us-more dictates are not Gospel. They didn't come down from the mountaintop with Moses! Try this one on: some (maybe MOST) of us don't agree with your economic formulas. And furthermore, these voices of informed dissent will not be silenced, even in the face of Congressional name-calling, media bias, and even bullying from the president ("I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to just get out of the way."). Not everybody likes this bill. If you're a Democrat, I think you need to listen to these people. Some of them have even read the bill.

Murdock Gibbs
Coppell TX