Obama and Healthcare: Fact and Fiction

President Obama is on the hunt for elderly and disabled people to put them on a “death panel” so bureaucrats can decide whether or not they are eligible for health care based on the contributions to society. Basically, if you’re not helping, you die.

All according to Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska.
And if you’ve learned anything since last year, you don’t listen to Sarah Palin.

Well some people still haven’t learned that and are rallying against Obama’s health care plan on the basis that he will refuse to provide care to people that don’t provide for society.

I don’t understand where anyone is getting this whole “death panel” idea from. In case those select few of you didn’t notice, we’re Americans. We live in America, as in the United States of America. As in the democratic country located in the Western Hemisphere. We don’t do death panels. As far as I know from my United States History class, we never did that in the first place. And since we’ve been on an increasingly democratic trend since then””abolition, civil rights, and working towards gay rights””I have confidence death panels will never exist.

To emphasize that he doesn’t intend to kill off the older generations of America, Obama spoke in his speech about groups that supported his plan, seniors’ groups included.

And if any system is killing anyone, it’s the current health care system killing the uninsured. A number of Americans simply can’t afford health insurance because the cost is so high. But payment isn’t just the only reason people go uninsured. Insurance companies have turned down thousands because of “pre-existing conditions,” which require a continuous influx of (usually expensive) health bills. And not having health insurance is no small thing; according to The Boston Globe, lack of health insurance causes at least 45,000 deaths a year.

But that’s just one of many unjustified claims made about the proposed plan.

Take the idea that Obama’s plan is socialism, or “socialized medicine.”
Universal health care is where the government ensures every citizen of a nation good health care. Socialism, according to the Oxford American Dictionary, is a “political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” In other words, the community has power over how goods and services are produced and distributed.

In the situation of Obama’s plan, the government is changing the way health care works. It’s not taking the system over. The extent of government control is it providing emergency health care to those who currently don’t have health care and offering health care to those in dire need of a cheap alternative. The government isn’t encouraging people to rely on the government. In fact, the new health care system would consist of “a market place where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices,” said Obama in his health care speech on Sept. 10. Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers.” The “marketplace” is where citizens would be encouraged to look for health care. For some families, even the most affordable options in the marketplace can break the bank. The government is an emergency relief for those families until they can afford the private insurance companies.

All of you skeptics can look at a number of other countries””Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan. These nations are all listed in Newsweek’s Sept. 21 issue as ones that “provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and mainly private insurance plans.” Notice the word private. Private most definitely does not mean government takeover.

So no, the plan Obama is trying to pass through Congress is not “socialized medicine,” as some would call it.

So the next time somebody you know starts talking about how Obama’s trying to kill the elderly and turn us all into a bunch of communists, make sure you tell them to check their facts first.