LAKE FOREST, Calif., Aug. 18/Christian Newswire/ -- Senior White House advisor David Axelrod spam-blasted a "viral" email Thursday, August 13, 2009, intended to "debunk" what he called the health care reform "lies and distortions" which are currently "flying unchecked under the radar." The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) announced today that it is responding with its own email reply campaign, intended to debunk the lies and distortions contained in Mr. Axelrod's email message.
Photo: Obama-Joker Poster, hi-resolution version available
The following statement was issued by CBR director Gregg Cunningham:
Americans don't want to pay for mandatory insurance which defines baby-killing as "essential care." They are turning against "end-of-life" counseling which is more coercive than consultative. It is becoming increasingly clear that this horrifying plan is designed to reduce the numbers of preborn children who could ruin their parents' careers and the numbers of elderly parents who might spoil their children's retirements.
CBR will urge every recipient of the CBR Obama-Care email to also read the short Obama-Care analysis at www.abortionno.org/pdf/ObamaCareEssay.pdf. CBR will also encourage recipients to forward this message to their entire email list, as David Axelrod is encouraging be done with his White House message. CBR is additionally working to persuade every opponent of Obama-Care to forward this email message, with the Joker image, to the White House at the fax number 202-456-2461. The White House has taken down its email addresses and is hiding behind website email forms (which block the sending of images such as our poster) to make it more difficult to reach the president by email. But the president needs to see this poster and he needs to hear from every American who opposes the publicly funded abortion and end-of-life health care rationing which will result from the plan which Mr. Obama and his socialist friends are trying to ram down our throats.
The CBR website www.abortionNO.org provides important information on health care policy, including the analysis at www.abortionno.org/pdf/ObamaCareEssay.pdf, which exposes the scurrilous deceptions being practiced by Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats. Culture-of-Death lawmakers are quietly confering on unelected bureaucrats the authority to later broaden abortion access and ration elder care (amounting to constructive euthanasia).
On June 29, 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported ("Obama's Health Future") a conversation Mr. Obama had at an ABC-televised "town hall meeting." He was speaking with the daughter of a 105-year-old woman who had initially been denied a pacemaker five years ago but successfully fought the denial. The device succeeded in giving her five more years of life. The daughter asked Mr. Obama if his plan would consider the "spirit" of a patient in making funding decisions for treatment and the president pointedly refused to say "yes." In a mildly scolding tone, he lectured that "...at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but asking for the painkiller."
In the United States, a pacemaker costs about $40,000. Approximately 100,000 patients receive them each year. The total cost of their treatment amounts to some $4 billion. That sounds like lot of money but it is actually less than Americans spend annually on chewing gum ($5 billion). Can we really not afford to give a pacemaker to a spirited senior citizen? In recent years, Americans have spent, per annum, $24 billion on DVDs, $28 billion on candy, $36 billion on tobacco products, $40 billion on coffee, $52 billion on pets, $91 billion on gambling, $93 billion on non-alcoholic beverages, $100 billion on alcoholic beverages, $183 billion on consumer electronics, $390 billion on restaurants, and $457 billion celebrating Christmas. One trillion is a thousand billion, so these discretionary acquisitions have cost us, in the aggregate, about $1.5 trillion per year. That is almost exactly the amount the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Mr. Obama's health reform package would cost over ten years. It is approximately two-thirds the $2.3 trillion we spend on health care each year and that list doesn't include sporting goods or vacation travel or countless other non-essentials on which Americans spend hundreds of billions of additional dollars.
The idea that we are so improvised that we must give pain pills to elderly Americans who need pacemakers is absurd.
The Democrat National Committee claims that if we do nothing about health care, insurance premiums will rise faster than paychecks, insurance companies will dictate treatment, insurance company profits will soar as they deny coverage, and insurance companies will require copayments and out-of-pocket expenses which will become increasingly unaffordable. But giving us a choice between doing nothing and doing Obama-Care is a false dilemma of the worst sort.
Real health care reform would amend medical malpractice tort laws to ban junk lawsuits. It would enact prohibitions against insurance exclusions based on pre-existing conditions. It would require portability of health insurance for people changing jobs. It would create a coherent system of electronic prescriptions and records. It would pay doctors based on performance instead of the numbers of procedures they perform. It would revise the tax-code to enable Americans to economically purchase insurance as individuals. And it would increase competition by allowing the marketing of health insurance coverage across state lines. These reforms would improve every aspect of health care, without the government taking control of every aspect of our lives. But that is exactly why Mr. Obama and his left-wing allies oppose reform which empowers patients instead of politicians.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that Mr. Obama's dangerous experiment with America's health care system will increase costs by $1.6 TRILLION over the next ten years. Two senior White House economic advisers recently let the cat out to the bag and disclosed the already obvious fact that Mr. Obama will raise taxes on every American now living and millions still unborn (if his plan doesn't abort them first) to pay for this boondoggle. Americans can stop this scandal if they read the PDF on the CBR website and send it to their friends and family. It will also send a message to Mr. Obama if opponents of Obama-Care fax this message to the White House.
This battle isn't going to end with the defeat of the current range of health care "reform" bills. The dreadful people promoting these frightening initiatives will be back. They understand the power of incrementalism. Problematic provisions such as those relating to end-of-life issues may be modified but if so, the new language is probably going to be deceptive and these provisions are likely to remain troubling because of the utilitarian bias of the bureaucrats who will administer the legislation. Where such language is removed altogether, look for it to pop back up from another committee or floor amendment or conference committee or administrative regulation. This is a struggle between good and evil and it will never end.
