Cause & Effect

I've often called the Democrat party the party of unintended consequences and through the years they've never proven me wrong. I'll stick with modern examples because there are so many it's hard to keep track of them all.

Pennsylvania: The new traffic lights used to replace the incandescent bulbs were of the LED variety. Low energy, long lasting and extremely bright. An initiative of the mostly democrat city council at the time, they never even considered the consequences of this earth friendly action. The LED's were installed during late summer of 2009 to great fanfare and applauded as a great step toward making the municipality a "green" haven. The cost savings were touted as a wonderful way to reinvest in the community. Every traffic light in town was changed and the city council prided themselves for their forward looking vision.

Now let's look at the reality those humanitarians didn't think of. When winter came around the LED's didn't create enough heat to melt the ice that continually built up on the metal housings. A rash of accidents occurred because motorists couldn't tell what color the light was. The ice blocked it completely. In response, the council was forced to pay city workers overtime to keep the ice from forming over the lenses. In total, the cost of the extra road crews and overtime amounted to three times the annual cost savings of the new, "green" LEDs.

Do I need to go on? I can but this isn't really the point. I've come to realize that any time a Democrat pushes a piece of legislation that "feels good" now, it always means it's going to hurt much worse later.

What I'm really interested in talking about is cause and effect. A simple scientific premise that is as immutable as truth and just as beautiful.

I'd like to use our new "free health care" as a more than adequate example. It's filled with lots of things that "feel good" right now but are bound to be extremely painful in the years to come. I'll start slowly so as not to make this too glaringly obvious and allow you, the reader, to acclimate yourself to both the reality of what we are all in store for and the sometimes peculiar way my mind works. I'll set this up in very simple vignettes that relate to a cause and an effect.

Cause: The new bill allows for free diagnostic screenings, mammograms, colonoscopies and the like. When I say free, I mean the patient pays nothing. The doctor and his office receive the same payment they would customarily receive from the patient's health insurance company.

Effect: My insurance company, in order to recoup their losses for all these free procedures will raise my premiums and rightfully so.

Cause: Obama has said often that his goal is to lower premiums by $2,500.00. A farce on it's face and ultimately deadly to an insurance company.

Effect: With ever shrinking premiums coming in, continued losses in the balance sheets leads inevitably to my insurance company going out of business. I am thus forced into the government "plan". I also like to call it the "final solution".

Cause: My employer, faced with staggering tax increases due to the stated goals in the health care bill of raising the money to pay for it all, decides to cut one of two things: payroll or health insurance. It is, after all, cheaper to pay the fine for not offering me health insurance than to actually offer it. Which do you think they will choose?

Effect: I am faced with unemployment which leads me into the final solution or the loss of my insurance which does the same thing.


I'm beginning to see a pattern here, aren't you? Two things spring instantly to mind. First: the death of private health insurance and second, and perhaps most insidious, the inevitability of all Americans to be dumped into the final solution.

I am not so naive that I don't know that both are the ultimate goal of the Obama administration. I've been vocal about the President's desire to see America become a single payer system. He's said it before and I suspect he's said it since taking office but only in private and never when he could be cornered by his words. For more than a year the Democrats in the Congress have made health insurance companies the biggest boogeyman since the Soviets of the 50's and 60's. They were made the enemy by the usual complement of class warriors who sought to instill anger and fear into an electorate that was already nervous and shaky from the collapsing economy.

The cause is universal health care and the effect will be the enslavement of an entire country. Likening the signing of this bill to civil rights legislation is reprehensible and diminishes the thousands who died for those rights. Mentioning Dr. King in the same breath as Barrack Obama is to spit on King's memory and his struggle.