“Great innovations,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “should not be forced on a
slender majority.”
But on Saturday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi violated this wise advice of the founder of the Democratic Party. She forced a measure to empower government to seize control over 18 percent of the private American economy, healthcare, on a vote that exceeded the bare majority needed for passage by only two votes.
Thirty-nine of her fellow Democrat Representatives voted nay.
Ms. Pelosi echoed President Barack Obama in describing her success in this vote as answering “the call of history.”
Trouble is, members of Congress were not elected to serve “history,” nor to fulfill left-wing ideology.
Each was elected to represent the will and values of the people in his or her district. That is why these lawmakers are called “representatives.”
Back in those districts, as recent polling makes clear, at least 57 percent of Americans now oppose the proposed government takeover of their healthcare.
With Obamacare's public support shrinking with every passing day, Pelosi reneged on her solemn promise to post this bill on the Internet for 72 hours prior to a final vote.
Her reason: the more people learn what is in this legislation, the more of them reject it. It disgusts not only free marketeers but also sincere liberals who want genuine healthcare reform.
Medical care costs are driven ever-higher as doctors pile up unnecessary tests to reduce their risk of lawsuits from ambulance-chasing lawyers. But instead of adopting reasonable tort reform, Ms. Pelosi included in her bill a provision to punish states that in any way limit how much loot trial lawyers are allowed to gouge from doctors, hospitals, and health-related companies.
These trial lawyers — among them former Democratic national ticket candidate John Edwards — are among the fattest-cat contributors to Democratic politicians.
This is just one of dozens of ways Pelosi's bill was crafted to benefit the special interests, not the American people stuck with the soaring price-tag profiteering lawyers add to their healthcare bills.
The Pelosi version of Obamacare — call it Obamalosicare — will strip nearly half a trillion dollars from Medicare, especially Medicare Advantage, forcing senior citizens to spend their scant life savings on supplemental Medi-gap insurance. This will bring billions of dollars into the coffers of the AARP, which after weeks of pretend-neutrality days ago came out with a full endorsement of Obamalosicare.
Many of America’s senior citizens prefer a self-reliant America and would have provided for their own retirement care needs, but from the New Deal onward, the money they would have saved has been taxed away for Democratic socialist schemes.
As the libertarian saying goes, government breaks your leg, then hands you a crutch and tells you to be vote for the politicians who crippled your ability to stand on your own in the first place.
Thanks to Obamalosicare, taxes and skyrocketing prices will be so crushingly heavy on the young generation that most may never feel able to be independent of the Democrats' expanding socialist welfare state.
Stripping away senior citizens' Medicare coverage and rationing their medical care will shorten their lives, but this will provide funds for health coverage for illegal aliens, still shielded from exclusion by sneaky provisions in Obamalosicare.
President Obama and Speaker Pelosi apparently share the view of internationalist billionaire and money-manipulator George Soros, the Democratic Party's and the left's Daddy Warbucks, that the United States is the biggest threat to world peace.
America, Soros has said, must be brought down as the world's sole superpower, brought down to the military and economic level of Germany or France.
Obamalosicare will certainly destroy the top-quality healthcare system available to most Americans.
Faced with its higher taxes, lower reimbursement, and bureaucratic harassment, a recent survey of physicians reported in The Wall Street Journal found that up to 45 percent of current doctors will retire if this government takeover of private medical care becomes law.
Moreover, Pelosi either willfully ignores or is blind to the reality that her de facto government expropriation of private medical care will hurt other nations, too.
Our free-enterprise medicine brings the productive incentive of profit into research for new drugs and other new approaches to healing and health, and this made the U.S. the world leader among developers of new tools of healing.
By jacking up taxes and bureaucratic restrictions on health-related companies and healers, forcing many into bankruptcy, Obamalosicare will choke off innovations that would have spread worldwide.
In coming decades millions could suffer needlessly or die prematurely because Obamalosicare stifles American medical research and innovation. This legislation is a prescription for a much less healthy future world.
The world used to depend on American inventors to create new medicines to heal humankind. Under Obamalosicare, as President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor Robert Reich admitted, we can kiss such medical innovations goodbye.
Speaker Pelosi's malpractice has already killed and buried the U.S. Constitution, which has no place in its Article I, Section 8 enumerated powers for her government expropriation of private healthcare.
Obamalosicare should have been crafted through consensus, bipartisanship, and openness. Instead we have a trillion-dollar bill packed with goodies to enrich Democrat-aligned special interests — a bill crafted by partisans behind closed, locked doors and passed Saturday by the thinnest of majorities.
The anger and cynicism Pelosi caused by forcing this legislation is hazardous to the health of our democratic republic.
Lowell Ponte is co-host of the radio show “Night-Watch,” heard live nationwide Monday through Friday, 10 p.m. to Midnight Eastern time, on gcnlive.com.
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