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.