Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Most weeks as I get ready and sit down to write I start thinking through all the things I could write about. I could share the story of the searching I’ve been doing for local boys killed in World War I, perhaps travel back down memory lane and talk about growing up the farm and the late dog days of summer just before school would start back up when the house stunk like cooked tomatoes for weeks, or maybe regale you with my view of the eventful night I spent as a patient in a sleep study lab. But for some reason none of those sounds particularly exciting.

I’m too wound up about the Fair and getting that strange urge to eat corn dogs until my sides hurt. It makes it really hard to concentrate and write about anything of great importance, but let’s see if we can find something to work over in our minds anyway.

I’ve been reading about the debate over healthcare in this country the last few weeks. As nearly a complete train wreck health wise I’ve found it interesting the outcry coming from the President that American’s need the government to control the healthcare systems. I guess part of me wonders exactly what is broke about the system we now have and what they hope to accomplish.

I know that there are people who don’t have health insurance either because of the lack of money to buy it, or because they just don’t feel the need to carry it. I have been in that spot a time or two, but have always tried to find a job where health insurance was part of my salary. Let’s be honest here, I don’t call it a benefit because it really is something the company is paying for me to have.

Could it be that this yet another ruse by the insurance lobby to ilk more money out of the pocket of Joe citizen? I’ve heard that not only will the government set up a federally run system where people are insured and the costs of doctor visits and the like will be regulated, but they will require you to have it. REQUIRE. That’s a pretty big word there. The guise of the plan is that this will in turn drive the costs associated with all insurance and health care down.

Does anyone in their right mind think this will work? We’ve already seen that requiring that every car on the road has insurance didn’t bring down the costs of auto insurance. I’m all for having people insured to drive their clunker down the road, but let’s be serious here. How about forcing the insurance companies not to jack up your rates based on your credit scores! And don’t think for a second they don’t! It is common practice in the industry to base your rate off of your credit score. The lower your score the more you pay. Now let’s just take a moment and think this through. Generally speaking, folks with a lower credit score have money problems. Maybe they can’t make ends meet, or they have to really make decisions of what bill to pay or if the kids can have straight teeth. So why would it make sense for the government to charge them more for something they have to have, when they probably can’t afford it in the first place?

Do we think that with government intervention that the cost of our medications, or what doctors are paid will go down? When you go to the hospital you pay not only for the doctor who treats your illness, but for the nurses and staff, the building upkeep, and so on. Would it be judicious for the government to set those rates? How would you react if the government came into your place of business or your job and told you how much you would be paid? Yeah, I thought so.

We all know about the Medicaid and Medicare programs in the United States. Good programs that have their problems, but still do a lot of good for most people. But just as Social Security was meant to be a failsafe program to keep people from living in poverty, suddenly we have made these programs an entitlement rather than a last resort. The fact of the matter is that once we give the government the ability to control one sector of our lives they don’t just set up a program and leave it alone. No, they want the entire thing and jump foot long into making sure they take the entire pie, and just not the piece they should control in the first place. And in the end who is left paying for it? YOU!

It’s really a funny system we have in place in this country. You and I can’t just print more money…I dare you to try to spend yourself over budget by about a Trillion dollars and see what happens. I’m pretty sure when you hit the $100,000 mark you’re probably going to loose your house, cars, most anything you own. But we allow our government to overspend constantly and without recourse. Do we just continue on this path until the country implodes around itself? We sold ourselves out once…do you remember? When I was growing up people bemoaned the fact that so much of our country’s wealth and debt was held by the Japanese. It scared people and we finally began to think responsibly in government and reversed that. Or so we thought. Little did we know that we have been walking around with our hand out while continuing to spend and spend and spend, only to be helped out by our good friend and ally China. Sorry…I’m getting off the point here.

I am concerned that there will come a point where the decisions about my body and the care of it won’t be left up to me. Oh, Mr. Weez…so you’re heart has a defect that you’ve lived with since you were three and now you’re 70 and you need to have a pace maker installed? Well, you see, we are out of pacemaker batteries and since you are now collecting Social Security and on government healthcare we’ve decided it’s just not a sound financial choice to install that and you’ll just have to take your chances. Yes, I’ll give you that it might be a little dramatic of me to think that way, but what happened to the party who wanted to keep government out of your lives? Where has that party gone?

I know there are problems with the healthcare system, but perhaps before we start handing everything over to the government to decide, we should look at fixing only the things that are wrong before we start handing them a blank check.

See you next week. Remember, we’re all in this together.