Follow me on Facebook!Too simple to understand.
Posted on March 11, 2010 - Filed Under Health Care
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Photo by Amy Conn-Gutierez, The Dallas Morning News. Used with permission.
Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, March 12, 2010.
My wife and I were invited by my good friend and the Tyler area’s former representative in Congress Ralph Hall to join him and his supporters on election night to eat barbecue and watch the returns.
So my wife, my younger daughter and I headed for the town square in Rockwall, where Ralph keeps his district office, and we joined what became a celebration as Congressman Hall easily beat back five Republican primary challengers.
The square in Rockwall looks like it came from a Norman Rockwell painting. The dozens of supporters, friends and constituents crowded into Ralph’s office looked as if they did, too.
Despite the fact that many in the crowd were anywhere from moderately to significantly wealthy, you wouldn’t know it to look at them. There were no Armani suits, no dresses from Michael Kors. For every man wearing a tie there were three wearing blue jeans, nondescript slacks or work pants. The women were wearing modest jewelry. The air rang with the sound of our Texas drawl as Ralph moved through the crowd.
In addition to the barbecue that the Ralph Hall campaign provided, supporters brought homemade pies and cakes. Someone made sure to give my daughter a homemade chocolate chip cookie with M&Ms baked in.
All of which led my wife to say, spontaneously, “These people are the salt of the earth.”
A fact that is both undeniable and yet totally unappreciated by those currently running our country.
It has finally gotten through to me that we – I mean you and me and the members of your Sunday School class and those nice people in Rockwall the other night – are all looked down upon by a very small group of east and west coast elites in government, the media and entertainment.
As was well-expressed the other day by Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes, there is a very strong tendency among our coastal elites to confuse simple people with simpletons.
Most Americans are simple. They love their families and they love the flag. They believe in God. They’re working toward a comfortable retirement. They instinctively understand that nothing worth having is free. They believe that able-bodied and able-minded people should not be dependent on the government.
Americans in their simplicity believe that the best way to have a secure future is to get a good education and then apply that education through hard work.
They believe they should be able to keep the majority of what they earn.
All of these traits lie at the very heart of American goodness and there’s nothing complicated about any of it.
I now realize that not only does that simple goodness not impress our uber-educated elites, they actually look down upon it with condescension and contempt. Imagine Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, with his multiple degrees from Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins, trying to relate to the Rockwall County treasurer. Imagine Attorney General Eric Holder, class of ’73 at Columbia, having a conversation with the Rockwall County DA.
Imagine Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric being sent to Rockwall County to cover Ralph Hall’s re-election.
All of these luminaries would react the same way. They would say to themselves, ‘Look at these unsophisticated rubes. What was she thinking when she bought that dress? Who tied that tie for him? Do all of these people shop at Wal-Mart?’
And then they would become more resolute in the conclusion that they have already reached. People like us, with degrees from state colleges and second-tier private schools and our thick regional accents, cannot possibly know, better than our pedigreed, benevolent elites, what’s best for us.
That’s why health care reform refuses to die despite being under water in the polls by as much as two to one.
In the view of our ruling elites, we don’t oppose health care reform because it’s too costly and too intrusive and will likely make getting the care we need more difficult. We oppose it because we are foolish children who don’t understand.
So, in much the same way our mothers made us take foul-tasting medicine when we were kids, we are going to get health care legislation we oppose because it’s for our own good. And if we object, we’re going to have our noses held with one hand while it’s forced into our mouths and down our throats with the other.
A small, elite group of people thinks that we 310 million Americans are not smart enough to run our own lives.
If you think the resulting mischief will stop with health care, you are dangerously mistaken.
Waiting for your invitation.
Posted on March 4, 2010 - Filed Under Health Care
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Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, March 05, 2010.
Cannock Chase Hospital and Stafford Hospital are both operated by Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) in Staffordshire, a landlocked county more or less in the middle of England.
It’s where you go in that part of the U.K. to access your government provided health care.
Here is what it says on the website shared by these two hospitals about breast screening.
What is the NHS Breast Screening Programme?
The Programme makes sure that if you are aged between 50 and 70 we will invite you for breast screening. We will get your name from your Primary Care Trust record. This record is made up from your doctor’s list so it is important that your doctor always has your correct name and address.
We invite doctor’s practices for screening in turn. So you will not necessarily get your invitation in the year that you turn 50. As long as you are registered with a doctor, we will invite you for breast screening before your 53 rd birthday.
We will invite you? As in, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you?”
Any woman who has a mother or a sister that suffered breast cancer immediately sees the problem with this. If you have a family history of breast cancer, sitting around until age 53 waiting to be “invited” could spell an early death.
I am not making this up. If you didn’t follow the link above, follow it here.
If this doesn’t chill you to your core, you have ice water in your veins. The British National Health Service rations mammograms by making women wait for an invitation to be screened for breast cancer. Inevitably, some invitations will arrive too late.
By contrast, if you are a 34-year old woman here in Tyler and are so inclined, you can probably get a mammogram somewhere here in town before lunch. A few months ago, my wife got a mammogram on literally five minutes notice while she was at the mall. (And she paid for it out of her pocket.)
For whatever you want to say in criticism of American health care, when it comes down to it, which would you choose? Paying out of your pocket or arguing with your insurance carrier on the one hand or on the other hand waiting for some employee of the government to “invite” you to receive a screening that might, when completed, have been done too late to save your life?
Americans are starting to understand this and that’s why the whole health care reform effort is underwater in the polls by double digits. Yet, Obama and the Democrats press on.
They persist in telling you that you won’t have to give up your health insurance if you’re happy with it nor will you have to give up your doctor. Don’t believe it. What they are proposing sets the groundwork for the federal government to unavoidably become the sole payer of health care costs. That’s because when everybody, by law, must have access to the same level of health care regardless of how much or how little they pay, demand will exceed supply.
When the train wreck happens, the government will inevitably step in and before long, you’ll find yourself sitting around waiting for your invitation.
Imagine if the market for 52-inch plasma TVs was managed in the same way. If you think you could go to Don’s TV or Best Buy this afternoon and pick one out, think again.
And while you’re thinking, don’t think that rich liberals are going to be waiting on their invitations. Already, somebody somewhere is no doubt drawing up plans for the poshest of posh health care resorts in some place like the Caymans at which Nancy Pelosi and Jennifer Aniston will get health care of a quality that will be unavailable anywhere in the U.S. to you and me.
The arrogance of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and their acolytes in pursuit of this disaster is unlike anything I have ever seen.
The American people don’t want ObamaCare and they have said so loudly and clearly. Somewhere in here, the number of American people that are tired of not being listened to is going to reach critical mass.
When families and businesses are struggling to survive, arrogance from those we elected to serve us is particularly intolerable.
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