“We Americans have the shortest memories in the world. We’ve been lied to and propagandized to by the progressive politicos since Woodrow Wilson. They’ve given us the income tax; the federal reserve banking system; the $35 TRillion in unfunded liability of Social Security; The combined unfunded liability of $80 TRillion from Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid; Obamacare; the unfunded state liability for their side of Medicaid which thanks to Obamacare will bankrupt all the states by 2022; $14 TRillion in national debt; an inescapable inflation facing us in the months ahead . . . and to reward them, we’ve handed them the right to control our very life and death.” Rajjpuut
A Healthcare Trip Back
to the “Good Old Days”
It was a time before rampant progressivism took over the Democratic Party . . . . Return with us now to those sedate days of yesteryear when Leave it to Beaver, Donna Reed and Father Knows Best ruled the airwaves such as they were in the pre-pre-MTV era . . . . In the real world, outside your black and white TV console, life seemed virtually as idyllic. Even when you as a parent came home to a sick child, you had the best health care system in the world looking out for her and the rest of your family.
In those halcyon days before the government got involved in the health care picture, a trip to the doctor cost $5, but in most rural communities only $4. There was a county hospital for the indigent (poor) who would never except in rare emergencies be treated anywhere else. If the child needed penicillin shot, add on a couple or three extra dollars. Many doctors in those times also made “house calls” for $10. A stay in the hospital in a semi-private room ran you $25 a day. Need an operation or get taken to the emergency room? You paid what you could and arranged with the doctor for follow-up payments . . . again, there was always the county hospital to fall back upon. Besides you could always plan ahead and buy health insurance.
Family health insurance -- largely via the Blue Cross and Blue Shield networks (Cross for hospital charges; Shield for physicians) was a mere $25 monthly and then your health care worries were taken care of. It was a different world then. The women’s movement was growing strong but those radicals known as feminists were no were to be seen yet. Typically the husband earned the family’s money and the wife stayed home cooked at least sixteen to twenty meals a week, watched the kids and kept the house in order. That’s what passed in those days for “not working” among women. For a family to live today with the same economic freedom and lifestyle as a husband earning $8,000 and stay-at-home mom back then . . . today would require both parents to work and pull in roughly $260,000 . . . that is they would be considered “wealthy” today but their home would be a lot dirtier and they’d subsist on five to ten fast-food meals per week. So what happened?
In part the differences are due to inflation. And inflation in America didn’t start to become a problem until Lyndon Johnson pushed Medicare and Medicaid, his “Great Society” welfare programs and his infamous “War on poverty." Between Johnson’s nonsense and the Vietnam War and the follow-up programs by Nixon-Ford and especially Carter . . . inflation rates rose to double-digits by 1978. Medicare and both the state and federal side of Medicaid were largely culpable . . . hospital costs rose 28% per year and physician costs 26% yearly now that Big-Daddy-GUV'Mint was footing the bill. As we in America are doomed to find out again courtesy of Ben Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing #1 and QE #2, inflation is a monstrous unseen tax. In short, the government stepped into things and they started going downhill fast.
Send a senior citizen to the hospital today with chest pains and he’ll leave a couple days later with the diagnosis of “acute indigestion” and the bill could easily surpass $30,000. With Medicare the hospital might charge only $7,000. The high cost? Today “private hospitals” are required by the government to offer “free services” because health care is no longer a “need” but now become a “fundamental right” according to the government. That free service must be offered even to illegal aliens. Yet since Obamacare panels now can decide independently from the doctor and patient and his family on how much and what type of services and how much money can be spent on each patient, they literally control who lives and dies . . . . If one must be treated for free, all must be treated for free including the illegals, but they’re allowed to literally kill a citizen by depriving them of care?
We Americans have the shortest memories in the world. We can’t seem to tie together the simple fact: everything outside of the military where government impinges upon private lives has become a disaster . . . . We’ve been lied to and propagandized to by the progressives since Woodrow Wilson. They’ve given us the income tax; the federal reserve banking system; the $35 TRillion in unfunded liability of Social Security; The combined unfunded liability of $80 TRillion from Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid; Obamacare; the unfunded state liability for the state side of Medicaid which thanks to Obamacare will bankrupt all the states by 2022; $14 TRillion in national debt; and based upon their great performance we’ve voted them in to office in such overwhelming numbers and handed them the right to control our very life and death.
We’ve even let them create our history for us via revisionism and bald-faced lies. We’ve allowed them to convince us that our most famously sound-fiscal conservative president, Warren G. Harding was our worst president ever. We’ve allowed them to call Herbert Hoover a “conservative” when it was his interference that ended the Roaring Twenties that Harding and his replacement (Harding died in office) Calvin Coolidge created, the most productive decade in American History. We’ve not been told that FDR and his VP John Nance Garner ran against Herbert Hoover calling him a “socialist” and pledging to cut taxes, and cut spending and then once in office did everything but what they promised. They do not tell us that Harding had provided the model which FDR was referring to when he ended the depression he was handed by Woodrow Wilson by cutting spending 49%; cutting taxes 48% and paying down the national debt 30% . . . ending the problem in 15 months.
We’re told that perhaps the worst president in history, Woodrow Wilson, was only behind Lincoln and the “great FDR” among the greatest of our chief executives. We’re not told that Wilson was a racist who stopped federal hiring of Blacks in Washington, D.C.; that his administration lied about going to war in Europe to get re-elected and then a month later got us into a war that was none of our business; that his administration created the art of propaganda; that they shepherded German and Italian citizens into concentration camps; that they closed down newspapers whose content they didn’t like; and that he left behind a depression that started out worse than what Harding and FDR faced.
We’re told that FDR saved us from the Great Depression when in fact his multiplication of the errors of Hoover between the two of them created a 12.5 year downturn that was only ended by entry into World War II. We’re told that conservatives and Wall Street created the financial meltdown that’s still got us tied up today. We even believe it when our progressive-socialist president tells us, “they ran the car into the ditch and now when we’ve almost got it out again, they want the keys back . . . .”
The truth for anyone who can read history is this:
George W. Bush saw Obama, Clinton, ACORN, and the progressives deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-ft. cliff (utter disaster); jumped into the front seat; grabbed the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes; and produced a controlled skid that dropped the car into the nearest friendly ditch.
We don’t know the truth**, we believe the lies, because we’re too busy watching sitcoms and reality TV while vegetating on our couches rather than taking the time to become informed citizens of the greatest country the world has known. Preferring our couch-potatodom and to get our “education” from progressive sound bites . . . that is why we’re in the mess we’re in . . . we did it to ourselves.
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
** Our present ceding of the right to life and death over us by the government while many of us cheered is just the latest in government-created abominations. Let’s look at that car in the ditch story . . . .
In 1975 0.24% of all home loans were “suspect loans” usually granted at 3% down payment or less. This was the era when conservative business practices ruled the day. In 1977, Jimmy Carter and his progressives gave us the Community Reinvestment Act forcing home lenders to knowingly consider unsound loans. By 2005 after four expansions^^ by Bill Clinton of the CRA ’77 legislation 34.2% of all mortgage loans were suspect . . . many of them granted at 0% down to people without jobs; people with lousy credit scores; people with only food stamps for “income” and even illegal aliens. Driven largely by ACORN (originally Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now created in 1977 by the progressives to “handle” voter registration and housing) and our first ACORN president Bill Clinton after whose 1998 steroid expansion of CRA ’77 it became easier in the 21st Century to put people with no chance (short of winning the lottery) to ever pay off their home loans into $400,000 homes than it had been in 1996 to put better qualified people into $120-$150,000 homes.
Bush saw the problem and in January, 2005, his administration tried to repeal the most onerous aspects of the five CRA expansions since 1977. He was defeated. Bush personally and his spokesmen went before Congress almost 30 times before 30 months later in July, 2007 a much weaker bill was passed. It was way too little, way too late and the meltdown began within four months. However, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in August, 2010, praised Bush for preventing the recession from becoming much worse and housing prices from tumbling precipitously.
This was just one more example of the great progressives whose “intentions were good” fouling things up beyond all recognition. And, of their historical revisionism and lying. We had the best home-lending system in the world and the world’s highest private home ownership (averaging 64%) the envy of the whole world. The system was NOT broken, but the progressive Democrats sure fixed it; and us.
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