Star Parker: On Obamacare: Just Say No

Star Parker

On Obamacare: Just Say No

Mr. Obama and his colleagues on Capitol Hill perceive a once in a lifetime opportunity to grasp the holy grail of the left and realize the dream of transforming America into a European style welfare state.

When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he chose the bible that Abraham Lincoln used on which to take the oath of office.

A little over a year later, as President Obama strong arms House and Senate Democrats to pass a health care bill that will nationalize 17 percent of our economic lives -- a bill that most Americans don't want -- we ought to recall Lincoln's famous words at Gettysburg.

Dedicating the final resting place for those who fought there, Lincoln appealed that we not let up in the struggle for "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Democrats may soon show, if we let them, that the American ideal of representative government -- government of a nation, in Lincoln's words, "conceived in Liberty" -- is lost.

Bending rules into a procedural pretzel, Democrats will attempt to pass one of the largest government takeovers of private American lives in history without a single Republican vote and, against the will of the people, Obama will sign it into law.

Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen write in the Washington Post, "...a solid majority of Americans oppose the massive health-care reform plan."

Pollster.com, which reports an average of all polls, shows that now for the first time disapproval for President Obama exceeds approval -- 48.8 percent to 47.5 percent.

According to Gallup, just 21 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, down 10 points from spring of last year when the health care reform push began.

And, per the latest from the Pew Research Center, only 13 percent of Americans view health care as "our most important problem."

But this isn't about logic. Mr. Obama and his colleagues on Capitol Hill perceive a once in a lifetime opportunity to grasp the holy grail of the left and realize the dream of transforming America into a European style welfare state. Democracy -- what the American people actually want -- is just not going to stand in the way.

It isn't just about Republican opposition. Nancy Pelosi must persuade, bribe, and threaten to get 216 House Democrats to support this despite having 253 sitting House Democrats.

Speaking the other day in Missouri, Obama mocked Republicans who want to stop this train and begin the process over.

But Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the nation's wealthiest men -- himself a Democrat -- said the same thing in an interview on CNBC.

Buffett said we should "start over." And he said, correctly, that the main health care problem is runaway costs and that the bill that the president is pushing "unfortunately ... doesn't attack the cost situation that much."

Yet, in his remarks in Missouri, the president said, "...let me tell you, we've incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain rising health care costs. There's not an idea out there that we have not worked on, that we have not included in this proposal."

At the recent White House health care summit, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-- Wisc., challenged with clarity the massive accounting gimmicks and hallucinatory economic assumptions that Democrats have used to present this massive budget busting disaster of a bill as a prudent deficit cutting measure.

Ryan, speaking for Republicans, showed that the 10-year costs are in reality $2.3 trillion, rather than under a trillion as claimed. It's all been ignored.

In the one laboratory experiment we have -- Massachusetts, which enacted a state plan similar to what Democrats want for the nation -- premiums are now the highest in nation, and per capital health expenditures are 27 percent higher than the national average.

Every freedom-loving American patriot that cares about our future should be on the phone today to their senators and congressmen saying "stop." 

Star Parker is president of CURE, Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education, and can be reached at parker@urbancure.org.