We, The People

To every member of Congress and to The President Of The United States,

This is a warning that we are coming. We are coming from red states and blue states. We are coming from large cities and small towns. We are coming from every corner of this land and you will be made to answer for your crime. The single greatest crime any elected official can commit.

Theft.

You stole from us and we are angry. We are outraged at your lack of honesty and your lack of courage. What you stole is the most precious gift we have ever been given and you took it from us in the dark of night while we slept. Peaceful and comfortable in our beds, you crept in and took it without a sound. How you stole is not as important as what you stole.

You stole our democracy from us.

It was given to us 233 years ago by men who cared more for us then, than you do now. They warned us in their speeches, in their letters and in their debates that you would come when we weren't looking. That you would hypnotize us with promises of safety and of security. They warned us over and over to be vigilant and we were not. We let them down.

No longer.

You will be made to answer every time one of us votes. You will be made to answer in a million phone calls to your office and a million emails as well. You will answer...or you will be removed. When we have removed you, we will see to it that whoever takes your place remembers who is REALLY in charge.

We, The People, are in charge in this country, and you will no longer forget that.

For too long we slept peacefully as the years flew by. We watched America being built, torn down and being built again yet still, we slept. We've slept through wars, through depressions and worse. We slept when man landed on the moon. We slept through watching the office of The President, once held by George Washington, a great and honorable man, turned into a farce by men with no honor at all.

We woke briefly on September 11th, 2001 and raged at the injustice but you lulled us back to sleep with promises of victory over our enemies. We grew tired waiting for that victory and fell asleep again.

Not this time.

This time you have awakened a sleeping giant who will not be lulled back to sleep until you return what you have stolen. That which is most dear to us must be returned or you will be made to answer for your transgression by those who elected you.

We are most certainly coming and when we do, you will not be able to withstand us. We will wash over you in a tide, millions strong, and sweep you from office. You will cower at our might, at our resolve and our firm belief that this country belongs to us...


We, The People.

Pt. 2 The formation of the plan and it's advisers

The fiscal and philosophical group

The most successful leaders in history have surrounded themselves with the best and brightest they could find to fill in the gaps in their own knowledge base. This is necessary to have any kind of success in business. If you have the best, you can expect the best. The same holds true in government as well. Throughout history, presidents have chosen the top minds from business, industry and academia to fill key roles in cabinet posts. These men and women have shaped the direction of the decisions of many presidents and some have even stood as examples of what our country stands for--Henry Kissinger, Colon Powell and Robert McNamara to name just a few.

In order to better understand the current plan the President has in place for overhauling the health care system, it's important to know the people he has chosen to advise him on such an important issue. He chose the best and brightest he could find to insure he would come up with the best plan possible. Let's meet just a couple:

Cass Sunstein - Sunstein is a legal scholar and the next head of the Office of Information and Regulatory affairs (OIRA). This position puts him in place to make decisions on budgetary items regarding the cost of a government run health care plan. Let's leave aside his radical views on animal rights, he actually believes that animals have a right to sue for grievances, and delve deeper into his thoughts on how government plays a role in our lives. He has written in the past his belief in the celebration of tax day this way,

"In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?... Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency."

This line of thinking presupposes that every thing we have is the result of a generous gift from government. The money in our pockets, the cars we drive and the very lives we lead are all extensions of the government. Now, I may not be a thinker at any level near Mr. Sunstein's but the idea that I owe my very existence to the government scares me more than just a little. This is just a taste of the philosophy he believes and we've barely scratched the surface so far. Let's hear Mr. Sunstein in his own words on the subject of "life years", a controversial idea in which he proposes that some humans are inherently more valuable simply because of their age,

"I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people."

Gone are the days where we used to honor the elderly in our society for their past contributions if Mr. Sunstein has his way. All that matters to him are future contributions. I wonder if he could be so callous, so unfeeling if it were his own mother or father suffering needlessly because a government bureaucrat decided that a life extending treatment has been deemed "not in the best interest of the collective". One last bit of information about Professor Sunstein is his admiration for the noted philosopher, Peter Singer, a bio-ethicist. Singer, a far left wing animal rights activist, has said that a border collie has more intrinsic value to the collective than does a child with developmental disabilities.

As I write this, I feel a chill at the thought of a man like Singer having sway over the opinion of someone who may decide one day that I am of no further value to the collective and should be "put down".

Next in line to meet is,

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel - brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and also a noted bio-ethicist. Dr. Emanuel has formulated what many in academia consider to be a brilliant work on the concept of the "complete life". In Dr. Emanuel's own words he describes how a child is not truly "human" until it has been socialized. This lesser stature leaves an infant in the precarious position of being considered not "viable" to society,

"Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.... Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.... It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does."

"Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not."

"Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create 'classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on,' but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible."

"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated" (emphasis added)

So anyone who doesn't fall into the age range of 15-40 deserves less care? Less attention? I am horrified by these remarks but Dr. Emanuel takes it even a step further,

"Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others"

"Many have linked the effort to reduce the high cost of death with the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. One commentator observed: "Managed care and managed death [through physician-assisted suicide] are less expensive than fee-for-service care and extended survival. Less expensive is better." Some of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court expressed the same logic: "Decreasing availability and increasing expense in health care and the uncertain impact of managed care may intensify pressure to choose physician-assisted suicide" and "the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care." (emphasis added)

"Drawing on data from the Netherlands on the use of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and on available U.S. data on costs at the end of life, this analysis explores the degree to which the legalization of physician-assisted suicide might reduce health care costs. The most reasonable estimate is a savings of $627 million, less than 0.07 percent of total health care expenditures." (emphasis added)

In those statements, we all cease to be individuals and become only numbers on a balance sheet. I find it comforting that doctors take their Hippocratic oath seriously. I want them to, in fact. That oath is, "First, do no harm." According to Dr. Emanuel it should read, "First, consider the cost and the benefit to the collective."

The President has more advisers helping him form his health care reform bill but these two alone should give us all pause to wonder at his good sense. In the weeks to come the views of these two men would shape what would be written into the bill the president hopes to pass in his first term.

Pt. 1 The Creation Of A Crisis

Talking down and taking down the current system.

It is March 2008 and a young, hopeful Senator from Illinois is speaking before a forum sponsored by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) about the issue of health care reform. He speaks of rising premiums and bloated profits by the health insurance fat cats. It's nothing new to this crowd. They're used to hearing the chants of evil corporate America and his words resonate well with them. He sits in a swivel office chair, completely at ease with the crowd and with himself. His mastery of oratory is well known by now and he does not fail to please in this instance. He intones solemnly about the need to bring down the costs of health care so that the average American can afford it. He uses the statistics that never fail to elicit emotion and a sense of outrage amongst his audience. He has them in the palm of his hand as he says casually,

"My commitment is to make sure that we have universal health care for every American by the end of my first term as President...but I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out..."

In that one, deft admission he lays the groundwork for what he sees as his monument to himself. A shining example of the mark he will leave on the country where he would very soon, be elected President. This is the great pyramid of his legacy. More impressive than a statue and longer lasting than one of his speeches. He continues talking about how corrupt the current health care system is, how patently unfair the whole thing is to the poor and disadvantaged. He is a class warrior with hardened armor borne of Chicago politics. It is strong, impenetrable and weathered well with the political blood of those who have dared to challenge him. He is a machine by this point, unstoppable and careening right up Pennsylvania Avenue with the ultimate next stop--The White House.

Fast forward to one year later, the former Senator from Illinois, now President of The United States, stands poised to launch the greatest social change in the country since civil rights. Not since the march on Selma has there been an opportunity like this. His popularity is soaring despite record unemployment and a massive crash in the housing market. He can do no wrong with the country and he knows it. Very little of what he has tried to rescue the flailing economy has worked and it's beginning to show signs of weakening even further in spite of the billions of dollars he's had Congress pump into it. GM and Chrysler are showing signs of impending collapse, banks are failing at an astronomical rate and the general mood of most Americans is one of outright fear. Even amidst the chaos of all that is going on around him, he sees the future he has planned for so long within his grasp. The time is right and the pieces are all in place. He gives his first speech before a joint session of Congress and includes this short paragraph outlining things to come,

"I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process. It will be hard. But I also know that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year."

Throughout the next few months he continues to ratchet up his rhetoric and hone his message to a razor sharp point,

"...right now families are being crushed by the cost of health care. Right now businesses are being crushed by the cost of health care. Right now our government is going bankrupt at the state and federal level because of health care. Right now 46 million people are without insurance."

The numbers don't lie do they? The statistics fall easily from his mouth as if he were channeling them from above. He has the country at a fever pitch and all because of those evil, greedy health insurance companies. It's a crisis of epic proportions and he's got us all convinced that we're doomed unless we do something about it. The country will surely break apart at the seams if we don't.

What he doesn't mention in those statistics are the hard numbers lurking inside that paint a very different picture. Of those 46 million people without health care, nearly one third make more than $50,000 per year and choose not to buy health insurance, one third are eligible but simply choose, for whatever reason, not to enroll and nearly 20% are illegal immigrants according to a CDC study. Another facet of the debate that never seems to get much mention is that excessive and burdensome governmental regulation has forced the cost of health to rise faster than the cost of living. He quotes statistics that show our health care system ranked lower than most of our civilized neighbors in the world but chooses to cite the worst of those statistics. He's laying the groundwork again to tear apart one sixth of our national economy with a constant barrage of doom and gloom. What is good about our health care system over our neighbors in the world, shorter wait times for treatments, more life saving research and treatments--those things are never mentioned when he talks about the uninsured and Americans quietly begin to doubt the level of crisis. This doesn't quite pass America's "smell test" but he remains undaunted in his goal of achieving the single greatest overhaul of the US economy since the New Deal. He's determined to succeed where Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Hillary Clinton have all failed in the past and he begins to make the list of those who will advise him on his victory over capitalism.