Seniors and the viability question

The e-mails of alarm about the Obamacare intention and HR 3200 just keep coming. Baby-boomer seniors need to take a deep breath and reexamine what they really believe about life and viability, because although rationed care is a concern in this bill, and should be, many are outraged by the thought of "counseling" for end of life care. Oh, they may point out its other failures and Bogey man features, like the huge increase in the bureaucracy that will be making decisions about their lives, but that periodic counseling feature is a real stick in the craw feature. It's not a huge stretch from rotator cuff surgery at 65 so you can continue playing golf to a new heart valve at age 90 so you can continue walking around the block and enjoying the great-grand babies. But think about it. Even those who didn't vote for the most anti-life President we've ever elected, who never wrote their congressman or carried a poster at a pro-choice rally, may have gone squishy along the continuum of aborting a fetus with Down Syndrome to removing the feeding tube from Grandpa because "he wouldn't want to live this way."

Well, now it's our turn isn't it? Now we're the ones about which someone unknown and nameless is debating--our viability and life-worthiness. Doesn't feel so good, right? In case you've never thought of it, none of us is "viable" without the help and care of others--our family, our friends, our employer, our drug companies, our truckers, our farmers, our merchants, etc. We're all just as much "parasites" as that developing fetus in the womb. If for some reason you were dropped on Mouse Island on Lake Erie without clothing, food, water, matches, or tools of any kind, you'd soon find out just how "viable" you are, whether 20 years old or 80. Oh, maybe you'd survive August or September on berries or an occasional dead fish that floats past--it is after all a fresh water lake--but January and February, if you lived that long, would be a bit chilly as the Civil War prisoners on Johnson's Island discovered looking at near-by Sandusky across the bay.

Also, it's past time for a lot of seniors to remember Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, WIC etc. are socialized medicine. They are out of control precisely because they are government programs, and what the government gives it can take away at the stroke of a pen, or smack of a gavel. Seniors need to be careful what they ask for or destroy. You didn't vote for tort reform, you didn't object when the government began limiting what it would pay doctors and hospitals, you didn't cry foul over regulation of certain professions or industries that drove good people out, you didn't look through those itemized invoices in the thousands for a day or two of care that dropped in your mail box 6 months later, you didn't ask questions when technology and drug research outran the bioethics arguments, so now it's time to pay the piper. I fear the price is more than you'll want to pay.