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A Voice from Fly-Over Country
November 9, 2009
America’s Health Care “Holocaust”
by Robert L. Hale
MINOT, NORTH DAKOTA — There is a frightening comparison between the health care plans proposed by Democrats and the Holocaust. However, it is not the comparison recently made by Representative Alan Grayson (D-Florida) in his drive to impose the Democratic plan on Americans.
The proposed Democratic health care plans contain many of the same elements of the Nazis’ plan to eliminate Europe’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. The unofficial death toll of World War II is 52,000,000. Death camps, internment camps, death marches, imposed starvation of non-combatants, and the deaths of non-combatants account for nearly half of these deaths.
A major motivation behind Nazi programs to exterminate Jews was to confiscate their property and give it to the state for redistribution. To accomplish this goal, the Nazis portrayed the Jews as evil, deserving to have their property seized.
Representative Grayson, from the floor of the House of Representatives, chastised his fellow members for allowing the “American holocaust” to continue. According to Grayson and his counterparts in the Senate, the “American holocaust” is America’s failure to provide universal health care in the U.S., funded at least in part by confiscatory taxes levied on a targeted group of taxpayers.
Like the Nazis’ targeting of Jews, Grayson targeted “the rich” to fund $500 billion of the cost of the House bill. His colleague in the Senate, Max Backus (D-Montana), is proposing $349 billion in new taxes on “high-end insurance plans (the rich), “fees” on insurance companies (evil doers), and taxes on medical device manufacturers (also evil doers).
In short, the professed altruistic largesse of these two is the same tactic the Nazis used when targeting the Jews. Both want to go after someone portrayed as evil and impose penalties. Both assert that these actions are justified and necessary. Both claim the state is the guarantor of people’s needs and wants. Both are selling a pig in a poke.
The United States was founded to protect individual rights and protect private property from confiscation by the government or anyone else. Protection of private property was an alien concept to German National Socialists. It is also alien to those pushing the Democratic health care plans now before Congress.
These self-proclaimed Robin Hoods are attempting to visit a fairy tale upon us while stripping us of any control we have over our health care choices. The health care plans promise to give something at someone else’s expense. Those who believe such a system will work believe in fairy tales.
Senator Backus’ plan would not pass a 10th-grade business class review. He claims he will fund $856 billion by two master strokes. One: He will cap patients’ yearly health care costs (i.e., he will effectively ration) by cutting $507 billion in current government health care programs. Two: He will tax insurance companies, insurance plans, and medical device manufacturers $347 billion.
If government cuts $507 billion from health care spending, it is fair to ask, “Who will not get health care? Does anyone believe health care needs are going to shrink by half a trillion dollars because Senator Backus wishes they would? Does he believe providers of services and goods will not pass on his tax increases?
To apply Representative Grayson’s “holocaust” analogy accurately to the Democratic plans: The Nazi plan for Jews began with demonizing them, then proceeded to confiscating their property, and ended by eliminating them.
The Democratic health care plans demonize wealthy taxpayers, medical insurance companies, and medical device producers and enact legislation to confiscate their wealth. This will motivate the wealthy to hide or to choose not produce wealth, and companies to limit expansion or go out of business. The end result will be shortages of services and options, escalation of costs, and rationing or premature death as the consequence of rationing.
Our health care system will follow the fate of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the United States Postal Service, Amtrak, Veterans Administration hospitals, and TARP. All are failures — failures whose debts are now on our shoulders and those of our children and grandchildren.
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A Voice from Fly-Over Country is copyright © 2009 by Robert L. Hale and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. All rights reserved.
Robert L. Hale received his J.D. in law from Gonzaga University Law School in Spokane, Washington. He is founder and director of a non-profit public interest law firm. For more than three decades he has been involved in drafting proposed laws and counseling elected officials in ways to remove burdensome and unnecessary rules and regulations.
See a complete biographical sketch.
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