ObamaCare – Exposing the Myth behind the All-Caring Federal Bureaucracy
on Monday, October 28, 2013
Exposing the Myth of Government Compassion
By Jake Danishevsky and Scott Rohter
It is hard for me to write this article, but if I don’t then my friends and readers won’t be able to learn another reason why Thomas Jefferson was right when he wrote that,“the government which governs least governs best.”
Any nation that depends primarily upon the participation of just a handful of people to make all the important decisions for the rest of the country is going to encounter serious problems along the way. The question is whether or not these problems become so serious that they threaten to destroy a great nation like ours. I am not sure if anyone has ever made this observation, but the truth is that the more that informed citizens participate in a democracy, or in a republic such as ours, the better it is for the future of the country. The two key words in my observation are “informed citizens.” Thomas Jefferson believed in the importance of education. He founded the University of Virginia in order to promote education. He was not a supporter of big government. In fact he was not really a big supporter of government at all. He once said that if he had to choose between government and a free press that he would choose a free press. Thomas Jefferson became the founder of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party today has strayed a long way from the founding principles that Thomas Jefferson believed in.
The Federal government and those who support its aggressive expansion into areas of our private lives which it has no legitimate authority to regulate keep encouraging it to find new ways to control our lives … These ways are outside of the scope of its Constitutional authority. The advocates such encroachments on personal liberty presume that the American people are not smart enough, nor capable enough to manage our own lives. These progressives believe that just a handful of elected officials in Washington D.C. can make better decisions for all the rest of us than we can either acting independently of one another or in concert with all of our collective heads put together
Those of you who think that our political leaders in Washington are smarter than you are, and that they can make better decisions than you can make might be surprised to find out that this isn’t true. To paraphrase Dr. Ben Carson who spoke recently at the Values Voters Conference, “Our health is one of the most important things in our lives, and because of that we should be the ones making our own health care decisions not the Federal Government in Washington.” No one has our best interests at heart more than we do.
Recently the Federal government was forced to shut down. Most people don’t even know what that actually means unless for some reason they didn’t receive their welfare check on time. It means that 82% of the government was completely unaffected by the shutdown. The last time that politicians talked about shutting the Federal government down was in the summer of 2011. At the time they said that they would have to close down all non-essential government agencies. Personally I think that would be a wonderful idea. I think that most government agencies are non-essential. We are currently unable to fund all of the government programs that were sold to us long before Barack Obama ever dreamed of becoming President. Now we have the “Salesman in Chief” trying to sell Americans on the idea of a complete government takeover of our health care system and the health insurance industry in America.
Instead of a takeover of our health care industry I would call it a takedown. Are you uncertain how you feel about a Federal government shut-down? Most journalists and politicians think it is a horrible idea and bad Republican strategy, but let me give you a personal example of why a government which thinks it knows best is really a government that doesn’t know anything. You can make up your own mind as to whether the Federal government is really your Uncle Sam or not.
Recently my family had a personal experience with one of our “compassionate” government bureaucrats. It was clearly a situation where a particular government agency did no pay enough attention to get the facts to do their job right. They made a bad decision based on a lack of information. Then they imposed that bad decision on our family. They did not correct the mistake later, and they never apologized for what they did wrong. The supposedly compassionate government employees who work for our compassionate government under the auspices of our compassionate entitlement programs really don’t care and neither does Barack Obama. The name ObamaCare is a misnomer. The Affordable Care Act should be renamed, “Obama Doesn’t Care.” The government only cares when you owe them money, or in my case if they think you owe them any money.
Do you think it is difficult right now to negotiate with your health insurance company over a claim? Just imagine what it will be like trying to negotiate with the Federal Government over your health care costs once they are paying all the bills. Just imagine trying to haggle with an I.R.S. agent over a decision they made not to approve you for a certain type of medical procedure or health care deduction.
My mother passed away on September 5, 2012. (God rest her soul.) The year before her death was a very tough year for all of us. We spent a lot of time in many different hospitals before she died as her condition kept getting worse. It was the hardest thing that our family has ever had to endure.
Besides all of the difficult medical decisions that we had to make, and the emotional issues of losing a loved one, there were the usual doctor bills and the hospital bills to contend with, and the difficulty of paying for everything that Medicare did not cover. But on top of this my father had to deal with something extra from our compassionate government of only a handful of policy makers.
My father received a notice that one month of social security benefits had been deducted from his bank account. When my dad inquired about why the government requested his bank to return a substantial portion of his social security benefits he was told that in their records it stated that my mother had passed away in August of 2012, not in September which is the actual date on her death certificate. It was a clerical error in their records, but they felt no need to notify my father of this discrepancy before they withdrew the money from his account. They felt no need to even request a copy of her death certificate which would have revealed their mistake. But that was just the beginning of our family’s sorrows.
Next we received a notification from my father’s bank that offered their condolences for our family’s loss and notified him that they had to return the requested funds to the Social Security Administration, but this time they listed my father as the deceased person! (God forbid.) “We are very sorry for your family’s loss,” it said, “but because you are deceased since September 21, 2012 (I don’t know where they got that date because my mother not my father actually died on September 5th) “we have approved the return of the designated funds. A full one year’s worth of social security benefits were then withdrawn from my Dad’s bank account and sent back to the Social Security Administration. My father was so upset that they had listed him as the deceased person (God forbid) that he couldn’t even get mad. He was so disturbed at their incompetence that he was nearly speechless. Then he had to spend 5 hours at the Social Security office to prove to the compassionate bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration that he was actually still alive (thank God.)
If their first mistake wasn’t bad enough, then the Social Security Administration compounded their original error with even an bigger mistake when they listed my father as the deceased person (God forbid). If this is this the kind of attention to detail that we get from government bureaucrats, are we just so enamored with that we need to have more of it?
You can’t fix stupid… You just have to eliminate it wherever you encounter it…It is disturbing to me that many people in my country want a bigger and more powerful Federal government. I love my country, not my government. I love the United States of America, not those who are destroying it under the false pretenses of trying to transform it at every opportunity they get.
When will my fellow Americans realize that enough government is enough? And too much of a good thing has become a bad thing. Too much sunshine can burn your skin. Too much water can drown you. And too much government can destroy what remains of your freedom. “A government which is big enough to give you everything is also a government which is big enough to take away everything.” That is a quote from a speech given by President Gerald Ford to Congress on August 12th, 1974.
Our government is supposed to work for us, but yet they act like we work for them. They behave like we actually owe them something instead of the other way around, and sometimes we actually believe it. There are times that we are afraid to question what they are doing. When will Americans realize that nothing in this world is free, and stop believing in the tooth fairy, or that the federal government can take care of them and make better decisions for us than we can make for ourselves? The original thirteen States which created the Federal Government are now actively being intimidated by it, and so are the other thirty-seven states which have become a part of our country since…
By the way, my father just received a notice in the mail that said my deceased mother (God rest her soul) has to appear for jury duty. They will probably want her to vote next! This is why I am not a fan of big government and not a big fan of ObamaCare, and for those of you who think that all of our families travails might have had something to do with the recent government shut down, it did not. All of these events occurred before the government was shut down.
I think the government should be shut down… not just 18% of it, but even more. I think that shutting down all non-essential functions of the Federal government should be just the beginning of our budget cutting efforts… If we can’t live without an unnecessary 18% of the Federal government than where can we even begin to scale back some of the excesses. Where can we begin to cut back the growing power and authority of the Federal government over our lives? It needs to be scaled back for the sake of liberty, and for the sake of our children’s future. America is 17 trillion dollars in debt. I think that a permanent shutdown of 18% of the government which is considered to be non-essential should be just the beginning of even greater government cuts across the board… real cuts that lead to real cost savings and help eliminate our budget deficits that occur every year. These should be substantive cuts that end all of the unconstitutional activities of our bloated Federal government. That’s the opinion of both of the writers of this article. What’s yours?
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Selected Reading
https://lessgovisthebestgov.com/blog/what-to-expect-under-obamacare.html
http://lessgovisthebestgov.com/Will-National-Health-Care-Hurt-Americans.html
