Star Parker: Government Health Care Plantation Looms

I love reading Star Parker's columns. She seems to have a way of looking at things, not necessarily from an opposite direction, but just enough of a different direction that things tend to become clearer. Her latest column concerning socialized medicine does just that.

From Town Hall:

Rather than moving dysfunctional America off the welfare state, as we did with welfare reform in 1996, we are now moving the free, functioning, and once prosperous part of our nation onto the welfare state. Bills out of committees in both the House and the Senate contain all the elements of President Obama's dream to get as many Americans onto the government health care plantation as possible.

That's right. Instead of getting people off of a dependence on the government, socialized health care is an attempt to get people dependent on the government.

More:

We've got creation of the new government run insurance plan that supposedly will create new competition. We've got fines on employers who don't provide insurance and fines on individuals who don't buy it. And we've got the trillions of dollars in new spending to subsidize insurance purchases for low to middle income Americans and expand Medicaid to get more low income Americans into it. And, of course, we've got the massive new government bureaucracy to oversee it all.

You read that right. More fines and more taxes. Health care reform was supposed to make things less expensive but the fines and taxes are going to make it more expensive for us. And why is Obama so hell bent on fining someone who chooses not to buy health insurance?

Here's some more insight you won't read about in Old Media:

Obama continues to tell the many millions of Americans currently insured through their employer not to worry, that "If you like your health care plan you can keep that..." But we know this is a slight of hand. Many employers will gladly pay the fine and purge their employees into the government plan. And how will private plans possibly compete with the government plan when politicians can reach into taxpayer pockets anytime they want to keep on subsidizing it? The Lewin Group estimates that a hundred twenty million Americans may be driven into the government plan.

120 million Americans. (140 if you count the 20 million illegals who will be eligible for taxpayer-funded health care.) And how are we going to pay for health care for all of them? New taxes. If you are one of the top 5% earners who happens to live in the state of Maryland, then you will be paying over 50 cents on every dollar you work to earn if the new taxes to pay for other people's health care goes through.

And about that promise to keep private insurance companies "honest?" Let's look at the government's track record on that:

Harvard's Malcom Sparrow, a specialist in health-care fraud, estimates annual Medicare fraud at $85 billion. The Government Accountability Office estimates Medicaid fraud at around $33 billion annually. So that's $120 billion a year in government health care fraud! This is who will keep private companies "honest?"

This socialized health care plan is a disaster waiting to happen, just as it happened in every other country it has been tried in.

We need to stop it before it wrecks the entire health system.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Government Health Care Plantation Looms
Star Parker
TownHall.com
July 20, 2009

Star Parker is the author of Uncle Sam's Plantation:

Uncle Sam's Plantation on amazon.com

Star Parker Supports The FairTax!

Yes! As time goes on we see more and more people coming over to support the FairTax as a viable replacement for our convoluted, often contradictory and wasteful current Tax Code. From Star Parker's latest column:

Economists can argue cause and effect. I'll just point out that as soon as we enacted the income tax, growth of the federal government took off and outstripped state and local spending as the major tax burden on citizens. The income tax, with its 45,000 pages of tax code, is now simply a sandbox for politicians and lobbyists to play in. This is what we should focus on in all the discussion about special interests, lobbyist influence and runaway growth in government. With a national retail sales tax to finance government, the tax burden on citizens would be totally transparent. Whenever you make a purchase and look at the sales slip, you'd see the 23 percent tax and know that's what you are paying for the federal government and its programs. When a Sen. Smith or a Congressman Jones shepherds some new program through Congress and the president signs it into law -- ka-ching! -- we'd immediately see it at the cash register. When you ask the cashier why you are now paying 24 percent instead of 23 percent, he or she can explain that you are paying for some wonderful new government program.

Just imagine how people will get motivated to stand up to politicians in D.C. if they could see first hand how playing political games affects the American consumer.

Star goes on:

Most of those 45,000 pages of the tax code reflect special treatments and deductions for businesses, particular types of investment, or behavior. This stuff got in there and regularly gets modified and changed as a result of various special interests working their magic. The number of registered lobbyists in Washington doubled over the last eight years from 17,000 to over 34,000. A good chunk of their business is generated by proposed additions or changes to the tax code. If you listen to Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, with all the talk of reducing lobbyists' influence, most of their pitch is using the tax code for their social engineering programs. I say get rid of the code, the Internal Revenue Service and the lobbyists.

Absolutely! As I have written several time before, the FairTax is the only Tax Reform Plan that that addresses three end-goals:

1) The plan must remove from the IRS any power to intrude on the private lives of American citizens.
2) The plan must remove from the K Street lobbyists any power to influence Congressional votes.
3) The plan must not allow hidden taxes to be passed along to the consumer at any time.

And this:

Ironically, the major reason why the national retail sales tax gets so little attention is because insiders deem it politically impossible to achieve. Those who are part of the problem don't want the solution. The tax code is now one huge special-interest honey pot and the swarming bees want to keep it that way.

Yep. Which is why we need to keep growing our grass-roots movement until it become a juggernaut that no politician, Dem or GOP, can ignore.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

A 'Yes, We Can' Plan With Beef
Star Parker
TownHall.com
February 25, 2008







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