Please Support us by visiting our sponsors
The mind is a funny thing. With all the talk of insurance reform an old memory worked its way up to the surface. I remember when I was a young child, setting at the doorway as my Mother and Father listened to an insurance salesman. You must understand that for years the common sales technique to sell insurance has been fear. They always paint the grimmest and most frightening scenarios. That is their jobs. Things like: What if your husband dies? Who will take care of you and your 3 young children? But that was his job. He never talked about the odds. Of course like many Americans, my parents would more than likely never understood or just been confused by the numbers. Anyway numbers can be twisted. Remember what Mark Twain said: “There are three types of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I’m not going to say that that insurance man was a villain. After all what he was saying was the truth. In the early 60s my mother and my siblings would have been in a desperate position if my father had met with an accident. He stayed on message and convinced my parents that life insurance was a good bargain. He didn’t lie or even stretch the truth. He simple painted the picture of “what if.” Unlike the current debate there was a consistent message.
When the President first started his sales pitch, in 2003, he was talking about having to sell the public option that would then necessarily force everyone into a single payer plan. But that he could not sell it that way, since it would scare people. Then he was talking about universal healthcare reform. That went to the "reform of healthcare to save the economy." Then when that didn’t work it became "insurance reform." Now it is a moral obligation to reform it. Through all of this not only has the story changed, but so have the villains. The President has blamed almost everyone for the problems with the healthcare system. The doctors, the insurance companies, the Republicans and their “mobs” of American people have all been blamed for something.
The latest target has become the insurance industry. Now I have to say that I’m no fan of the insurance companies. But they are companies that provide a service. They have a responsibility to their stock holders and employees to make a profit and grow the company. This is something that our President has never had to do or seems to care about understanding. These companies have for years looked at the odds and gambled on investing their money in ways that will keep them in the black. They are not in business to lose money. If they were forced to run without profits, they would not be able to provide their services to us. It is sad but true that it does all come down to money.
Since 9/11/2001 the American people have been living in a heighten state of fear. Many of us are still very concerned about the enemy that attacked us on that day. There are those that think, with some good reasons, that the government has fostered this fear and taken advantage of us. Many believe that the current economic crisis was created by those on the left as an October surprise to create new fear. I don’t know if that is true but there would seem to be evidence that the short selling in the Money Markets that started this panic has the fingerprints of a major currency trader all over it. If you add Rahm Emmanual’s statement: “you can’t let a crisis go to waste.” I see people peddling in fear. Would Mr. Emmanual take advantage of a drunken girlfriend? Well I don’t know, but it sure seems as if he has no problem taking advantage of the American people.
If you look at the bills that have being pushed through the Congress, it looks as if much of the content was simply political payoffs. Money put in the hands of supporters of Obama and the Democrat party. These bills were pushed through without or with very little debate. They thought they would be able to do the same thing with the healthcare bill. The pattern was working and HR3200 was being lined up to be rammed through with only a few knowing what the bill actually contained.
Let us not forget that there is a difference between foreign enemies and internal crisis. We must always keep in mind the since 2001 we have been under the threat of a terrorist group that wishes to kill as many Americans as possible. That is an external threat that in reality has existed for many years. But until 2001 they had never been brave enough to attack us on our home soil.
The American people have been near panic mode for so long that they are beginning to understand that there has been a lot of exaggeration lately about the current situation. Remember how they told us that if the stimulus bill was not passed we would have another depression? Well they passed it and unemployment is still rising. Now they tell us that the recession is over. But they still want us to believe that there is a crisis in healthcare that only they can fix. They tell us a lot of things and the stories are constantly changing. If you have to keep changing the story to convince people that you are telling them the truth, then I feel that they were not and never have been truthful. They are just looking for the story that we will buy.
So here we are with a President who can’t keep his stories straight who has been selling panic and fear from almost the first day. The magic appearance of a bill in the House that is over 1000 pages long that the President has not read but told Congress he wanted it passed before summer recess. Then he traveled across the country telling what was in the bill. But when people starting looking at it, they found that his story did not match the contents. The party’s worst fear was that people would actually read it and they could pass it, the President would sign it, and no one would be the wiser. They thought that our fear could be manipulated to their own means.
It seems to me that the truth is that many of the fears that they are playing upon are largely overblown. I think that the problems could be fixed without the dismantling of the American system and the destruction of a service industry, which has been demonized, but regulated by the government that is now blaming them for all of the problems.
So like the insurance salesman of my youth there are a lot of "what ifs" being thrown around. What if you lose your job? What if you have a preexisting condition? What if you get sick and can't work? What if after what if with no other reason then to scare the American public into buying a complete remake of the a system that government meddling has created much of today's problems. Fear will not work forever and there are those who don't want to buy health insurance. Those people will be required to purchase it by law. That seems to be too much of an intrusion into the lives of people who have always had great pride in our freedoms.
Americans are afraid today of many things but many of those fears are not new. Everyone is worried about losing their lively hood. We worry about illness and accidents. We all should face up to the fact that these things could happen to any of us at any time. We just can’t live our lives in fear. We have to come to terms with all of the "what ifs" of life. We have to prepare for the future and hope for the best. But we can not accept recklessness. We expect our leaders to be thoughtful and deliberative. I don’t see this out of current “leaders.” I see a rush to implement a huge government bureaucracy to fix a lot of small problems. To paraphrase a famous quote from the
©2009 Pedro Sykes
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for commenting on my blog. Please keep comments civil. This site uses Automatic SPAM technology. All SPAM messages will be removed. All rude or profane comments will be deleted.