Opposing Obamacare

A tip o' the hat to Holly for spotting this one first.

The American Spectator has published an article giving an interesting perspective on how to oppose the President's health care proposals. It's founded solidly on fact and logic, rather than hype and emotion. A short excerpt:

It's not a crisis, but just a problem.

Barack Obama's solution is neither safe nor sensible, but reckless and risky.

Not a crisis.

Reckless and risky.

Those are the themes, the very words, that opponents of Obamacare must use throughout the August congressional recess, and as long as it takes after that, to finally kill the whole, monstrous effort.

The current U.S. health care system, or actually just a portion of it, is just a problem, just like so many problems of a far worse nature that Americans have solved before -- without panic, without drastic over-reactions, without radical, risky, reckless responses. Or, to use a medical analogy, there's no need for open heart surgery when a catheter and a stent, along with some statin drugs, can do the job just fine. Better yet, there's no need to amputate the leg and attach an experimental type of prosthesis in response to a badly sprained ankle.

. . .

The very last thing Americans need is to let bureaucrats decide who will and won't give care, especially in situations of life and death. But Obamacare so clearly threatens that scary, Soylent Green-like result that even a major Democratic state senator in New York is seriously concerned about it.

As Philip Klein has so convincingly shown on these pages, just about every claim Obama is peddling about health care is a myth. There aren't 47 million uninsured. The problems in the system aren't caused by the free market but by distortions of the free market. And so on. There really is no crisis.

. . .

Trus-s-s-st in me, says Obama, like the Disney version of Kaa the python, but Americans should know better. Pythons and bureaucrats alike have coils that can be almost impossible to escape, and it is reckless to jump into those coils in the first place.

. . .

What's worse is when recklessness risks not just health care, but freedom. When bureaucrats make all the decisions, and they refuse to pay for anti-cancer drugs but offer to pay for assisted suicide, that's not freedom. When even the current Medicare system forbids people to opt out of its benefits, that's not freedom. When the government sets up an "age rating system" and doesn't allow people to shop around for a deal that takes more relevant factors into account, that's not freedom.

There's more at the link. The whole article is recommended reading. It makes some very telling points.

Peter