Posted by
Marked in Pgh on Monday, August 03, 2009 4:04:16 PM
Rep. Tim Murphy (R) had a townhall meeting, and over six hundred people showed up. They were anticipating three to four hundred and kept attendees and their guests aware of a change in its location because of the growing interests of the people to participate in the running of our republic. The attendees were overwhelmingly conservative, many elderly and concerned about the fiasco of socialized medicine. The people were respectful, but insistent about their objections to this new tyranny. Rep. Murphy was informative about the implications of this new scam and, as a conservative member of Congress, was against the legislation. There were only a few liberal idiots outside asking us to sign a statement to support Obama on the bill. We told them no.
Inside the meeting, most of the questions were against the bill and other liberal agendas. Some of those who spoke were for socialized medicine or placed the blame on the current system. Only two of them stood out. One looked and sounded like the son of Pony Tail Boy, the pea brain who stood up in the Richmond bebate during the '92 election and asked Clinton to be a like a father to the nation and see the American people as his children. What a woos. Pony Tail Boy Jr. delivered his talking points by making snide remarks about the evil drug and medical insurance companies while suggesting more competition be introduced into the system by allowing the Federal government to provide a public alternative. Yes, there are people with addled enough minds out there who can't think for themselves. Then there was a research doctor, with almost no clinical practice, who said America's health system was ranked thirty something in the world. (The World Health Fund just voted America's health system number one in the world). We didn't believe either of them.
Few of us wanted any major change in in the systemt; with the exception of tort reform to reduce the need for high malpractise premiums doctors had to pay and forcing members of Congress to live with the same health care program they are fostering on us. As it is, the members of Congress have a wide variety of private, not public insurance programs available to them, which will not be available to the rest of us once the private insurance companies are squeezed out of the system. It makes you wonder how long Sen. Kennedy would have survived on such a public program with the Federal government in charge. The old war horse would have been told to go to the glue factory during his first five year review.
As far as the research doctor, he further said America ranks far below other countries in life expectancy because of our health system. With the third largest a nation in the world, with of over 330 million people having a life expectancy of nearly 80 years for women and over 77 for men; America is doing a great job by any standards. And those figures probably include the fifty thousand people a year who die in auto accidents in a country which accounts for half the cars in the world.
With so many people jeering the doctor, I wasn't able to ask him what country has the longest life expectancy. A few years ago, it was Andorra, with a life expectancy of 84 years for I believe both sexes. I would have further asked him how the Andorrans achieved that feat. Was it the clean mountain air? The generous government run health program? Hell no, Andorra's main industry and way of life is smuggling goods back and forth between its neighbors, France and Spain, through the mountains so the French and Spaniards could avoid paying high taxes used in both countries to support government health care scams. In other words, free enterprise and individual choice are the best prognosis for long life expectancy. John Handcock and other Founding fathers did the same thing against the royal government of Great Britain, not by submitting to the power of the ruling class. Well, Handcock always had a full bowl of spiked punch aboard his ship for additional intestinal fortitude. Ah, the good ole days. Today, his punch drunkeness would be considered a pre-existing condition.
Perhaps bucking the demands, rules and taxes of unresponsive governments are the best self-medication for prolonging one's life and liberty, instead of following the ill-conceived ideas of the yahoos in government.
It's still our duty to keep hounding after our representatives and senators to do their duty. I know I can trust Murphy, not Senators Specter or Casey, but I'll keep track of all three of them.