Hillarycare and ELCA

I used to be a Democrat, and voted for Bill Clinton.  I left the reservation in 2000, and some of my ire was at Hillary for her universal health care plan, when she was FLOTUS, and some was at her philandering husband.  I retired that year from OSU and no longer had to worry about being a Democrat with conservative values. But a 1993 letter shows the worm was turning much earlier.

While cleaning yesterday I came across a  November1993 letter I'd written to The Lutheran, organ of ELCA, the largest Lutheran synod in the U.S.  At the time I didn't know ELCA's position on abortion (anytime for any reason), or I may have left our church.  The magazine had carried a "Special Report: Health Care," and it seems to be written by Lawrence O'Connell S.T.D.  The initials aren't for sexually transmitted diseases, but doctorate in sacred theology. That said, it's HillaryCare. I don't know who gave him that degree, but I give him an F for ethics, after going on-line and checking out various boards, committee, and positions he's held.

The heart of my letter (ELCA didn't respond nor did O'Connell) : "Instead of placing personal responsibility for good health as first, the task force put it number 13.  We would not have a need for such a document or billions spent on health care if it were not for abuse of alcohol, cigarettes, food and sexual behavior.  Once those health problems, all of which are personally manageable, are set aside, we can afford the rest with pocket change."

I go on to ask how is it ethical for O'Connell to decide I should pay the social and economic costs of someone else's abortion, drunk driving, obesity, STDs or even failure to floss?  where is the justice in "redistributing" our resources? Hasn't socialism, which is what "redistribution" and "communal sharing of risks" means, shown itself to be a complete failure in Eastern Europe and the USSR?"

Stealth and desensitization—the dumbing down of Americans

Were Christians in the 1990s just smarter about healthcare? They helped Republicans fight Hillarycare cooked up by the first lady and Ira Magaziner which included a section that would have denied insurance if parents refused to abort a child with disabilities. Yes, the party of choice. Now we have Hillarycare by stealth.

I don't know that this abomination is included in Obamacare (as it is 93% of Down Syndrome babies are aborted), but we don't know what's in it, do we? However, Christians who stayed home Nov. 6 gave us our current healthcare disaster. Obama could not have won without them.

"What most Americans don’t know is that IPAB [panel of bureaucrats, aka death panel] is set up to function exactly like the UK’s National Health Service rationing board known as NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence). NICE prevents doctors from prescribing state-of-the-art drugs for breast, stomach, lung, and prostate cancer or diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and many others, she explains." http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=19611

Hillarycare 17 years later

Here’s a good analysis of Hillary care of 1992 (as it was known by its detractors) written in 2007. I was looking through it to see what the reasons were that it went down. The author, Paul Starr, was an insider, having been brought into the process by Ira Magaziner. He sites:

• right-wing misrepresentations
  
• malicious personal attacks on Hillary
  
• reporters and the public thought that Bill Clinton had handed over the policy to Hillary
  
• false charges
  
• misunderstanding the politics behind the plan
  
• distrust of the Washington bureaucracy
  
• no positive consensus about what to do among Democrats
  
• change in priorities by President Clinton
  
• charges of heresy from the Left and Right alike
  
• accusations of secrecy (30 working groups)
  
• began with a huge program that could be bargained away by layers
  
• lurid fears from talk radio that the federal government would control every detail of medical care

It all sounds quite familiar given what we've been going through since Obama tried to ram jam the mega-health bill through in August. Apparently, some of his supporters are too young (or too old) to remember that many of us remember 1992!

But in that entire list, which could be ripped right out of a report from Katie Couric this evening, there's not a single charge of racism. Odd isn't it? I'm sure personal animus toward Mrs. Clinton was part of it, particularly since she wasn't elected and according to Starr her role was misunderstood, but apparently no one said the conservatives dislike for her plan was based on her race. Yet faced with many of the same arguments, and an even bigger, more complicated and confusing plan/bill, now we're racists.