Obamacare is “a crisis of culture”

posted at 6:53 pm on March 16, 2010 by Cassy Fiano
[ Healthcare ]   

Socialism is coming to America. And it’s coming in the form of Obamacare. Democrats are intent on taking over 1/6th of our economy with their pitiful excuse for health care “reform”. Their reform is not to make health care more affordable or widespread. It’s to expand the government and to increase the amount of power Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have in DC. They certainly aren’t doing it to help all the little people who just “can’t afford” health care. This is a crisis of culture, according to Dr. Roger Starner Jones, a doctor who specializes in emergency medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Read on:

During my last night’s shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B; tune for a ring tone.

Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.

She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer. And our President expects me to pay for this woman’s health care?

Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture – a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.

A culture that thinks I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me.

Pretty much hits the nail on the head, doesn’t it? This is the problem with liberalism. If we go with Obama and Pelosi (and their third little stooge, Reid), then things like responsibility and accountability will become things of the past. Why bother? If the government takes care of you from cradle to grave then why does anyone need to take care of themselves? Liberalism seeks to completely reshape the American cultural and societal landscape. This country was founded on a frontier spirit. The people who moved here and settled on this land were risk-takers, adventure-seekers. They wanted the freedom to find better lives, to take chances. They understood and accepted the dangers and the risks that this involved. They wanted the responsibility of building their lives the way that they wanted them. They fled oppression from all over the world just to have the ability to make their own decisions. Liberalism would take all of that away. With a liberal, socialist, nanny-state government, you won’t ever have to worry about making any decisions yourself.

And Obamacare is one step in that direction.

Oh, sure, they’ll give you all kinds of examples of these poor, poor Americans who “can’t afford” health care. But are these people truly incapable of paying for their own health care? That’s one of the primary arguments being made on the left: that those who live in poverty can’t afford health care and health care is a right that all Americans deserve. Setting aside the fallacious argument that health care is a “right”, let’s examine the premise that America’s poor can’t afford health care.

Does anyone remember a study from Heritage done about six years ago examining poverty in America? It certainly gives you a different perspective on just what we consider “poor” to be.

Poverty is an important and emotional issue. Last year, the Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States declaring that there were nearly 35 million poor persons living in this country in 2002, a small increase from the preceding year. To understand poverty in America, it is important to look behind these numbers to look at the actual living conditions of the individuals the government deems to be poor.

For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 35 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity. Most of America’s “poor” live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or welloff just a few generations ago. Today, the expenditures per person of the lowestincome onefifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.1

The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:

• Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only 6 percent of poor households are over crowded. More than two thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

As a group, America’s poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middleclass children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do higherincome children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

So, those who live in poverty in the United States seem to have it pretty well off. They aren’t overcrowded, they’re reasonably well-fed. By most rational standards, that would be described as living comfortably. You own your own house, have a couple of cars, color TVs, DVD players… sounds like America’s poor have it made. If they can’t afford health care and really need it, is it possible that maybe they could afford it by selling one of their cars? Maybe a TV? Perhaps they could get rid of cable. Dr. Jones’ patient mentioned above could maybe quit smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day, stop spending hundreds of dollars on tattoos, and maybe get Payless brand shoes instead of some expensive name brand. Maybe then she could afford to buy a private health insurance plan through, I don’t know, Blue Cross Blue Shield rather than making responsible taxpayers have to pay for her health care.

And Obamacare sums up the problem with this country in a nutshell. We went from a nation of people who wanted nothing more than to be in control of their own lives to a nation of people living off an entitlement mentality, desperate for nothing more than to get their slice of the government pie. Obamacare is just a symptom of the liberal socialist disease. As Dr. Jones said, this is a crisis of culture. Our culture is becoming rotted and we cannot survive it. Obamacare is just the beginning. If we value our country, if we want to keep that enterprising, entrepreneurial, frontier spirit alive — instead of an attitude of entitlement — then we must stop this bill.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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