Liar, Liar… Speech on fire!
Having not watched the speech (I make a practice of putting myself in situations wherein I may be the victim of malicious prevarication) I think it is still safe to say that the whole thing was a bunch of BS. I heard the sound bites, I saw snippets of transcript… it was the same old, tired lines about 40 some-odd million people without insurance and how we just HAD to make sure that everyone has insurance. What crap. How many of those people choose not to carry insurance because it would impinge on their cable package and smokes? Yeah. I gotta tell you, I’m just hopping at the opportunity to pay for their insurance. Here’s an idea: instead of forcing the country into a plan that (no matter WHAT the mainstream media says) DOESN’T want any part of this plan, why don’t you remove all the government fetters and let the market drive prices down in competition? How can they do that, you ask? Eliminate mandatory coverages. Why the heck should a young, single male without a girlfriend, much less a family, have to buy an insurance plan that pays for pre-natal care? Where does that make sense?
Why should I have to pay for cancer coverage if I don’t want to? If I am free to buy the policy that I want at a competitive price, I’m sure as heckfire gonna do that over buying the government-mandated “one-size-fits-all” plan. Eliminate the barriers to portability. If every company in the nation can compete for any person in the nation in terms of insurance, there will CERTAINLY be a drop in price, based solely upon the (empirically demonstrated) law of supply and demand.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that both of these restrictions are inflicted upon the market by the same people that now want to “fix” what’s wrong with the market? If I came into your house, busted your tv so you only got 6 channels and then offered to charge you a pile of money to fix it, you’d probably throw my backside out the front door, toolbox in hand… and you would be right to do so. So why does the democrat party think that we will let them do the same thing to our healthcare insurance? Ridiculous.
I think we can… I think we can…
So I get news today that Barack is going to be emulating Good Ol’ Abe Lincoln for his trip to Washington for the Inaugural. What a pandering load of horseapples. He’s NOT Abraham Lincoln any more than I am Queen Elizabeth. Barack has decided that rather than take the fast, secure and easy to guard plane ride to Washington, he is going to take a circuitous TRAIN route to the inaugural. WHAT? You want to use the technology of yesteryear and travel along hundreds of miles of usually unguarded railroad just to play at a flimsy (completely useless and incorrect) illusion? Lincoln took the train because it was the fastest way to get there at the time… now, it is certainly NOT. Especially when you are going from Chicago to Philly to Delaware to Baltimore to DC. Could this be an omen of things to come? Is this “Change we can believe in”? How many otherwise useful police and secret service officers will be standing out in the freezing cold northern winter (since global warming seems to have taken the year off) to guard all this rail line? What kind of expenditure is this to the taxpayers? Couldn’t those officers be doing other things than guarding an overly long, and completely outdated route to Washington? Way to look out for the middle class there, Barak. Think of the absolute limits of an expenditure for a flight.. private plane, existing secret service detail, MAYBE an armed escort of F-16′s… done. Instead we have countless man hours protecting and monitoring rail lines for weeks and months ahead of the trip, the guards at every bridge and overpass on the day of, the guards, surveillance and planning at each stop along the way… we’re already into hundreds and hundreds of man hours, plus equipment and gas. You know that train is going to be retrofitted with Bullett Proof Glass… which ain’t cheap. This really burns me up. I hope all of his “change” doesn’t reek of the 19th century.
You know what though, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. Medicare will start demanding that doctors “bleed” patients to cure ailments and leeches will be used for all sorts of fun illnesses. Of course this would lead to a severe and rapid decline in the number of people on medicare (which might solve some of the budget overruns). We could start hanging convicted murderers in the square rather than giving them years and years to suck up taxpayer cash in appeals and frivolous lawsuits about broken cookies. Now THAT’s change we can believe in…