Had he stopped after five minutes, we all would have signed up.  His eloquence was in top form for at least that long in his health care speech to Congress, even if he precipitated credit to his own policy for pulling our economy from the brink.  Who needs the Fed anyway?  Ignoring that minor self-adulation, the President correctly postulated [1]: 

- We are the only advanced nation that tolerates the loss of insurance and hardship of individual medical expenditures;

- Insurance prices rise too rapidly [true, in comparison to GDP or real wages];

-  If  “… you move, lose your job or change your job, you’ll lose your health insurance too”.

- “We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country”  [actually, it is closer to two times as much];

- “Our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers [because it raises Medicare and Medicaid costs] …”

Now, if we would give this problem to an Economics 101 class, they might conclude (if Paul Krugman is not teaching the course) that demand must be outpacing supply in both the insurance and health care markets, that both markets may be non-competitive, or that the underlying costs of insurance and health care drive prices too high. 

They might come up with a system that conduces more competition in order to balance supply and demand, increases production and encourages greater choice to put downward pressure on prices, and minimizes all direct and indirect government contribution to structural costs issuing from regulation or institutionalized waste and fraud. 

Instead, the President proposed:

- No change in employer-provided health insurance; in other words, for 85% of Americans who have insurance and for their employers, the President’s plan offers no relief.  The practice of welfare for corporations in the form of the medical insurance tax deduction will prevail and continue to spread cost escalations throughout our economy.  Employers will still be permitted to pick their employee’s health insurance carrier instead of us allowing consumers to choose in an open market.  Carriers may continue to nominate “in-network” providers, thus maintaining a lid on supply.  There will be no competitive pressure to lower price or to reduce the component costs of health care.  And we certainly will not upset the munificent benefits unions negotiated—you know, the kind that forced GM to become part of the country’s investment portfolio.

-  For remaining the 15% who have no insurance [2] or for the entrepreneur starting a business, the President offers a “marketplace” of insurance products, although, curiously, not for another four years.  This may sound like a fillip, though there is nothing novel here.  As long as the present market remains oligopolistic, that is, as long as the number of insurance carriers is limited and inter-state contracts proscribed by states, simply selling insurance on the Internet cannot introduce efficiencies.  If those restrictions were lifted, private enterprise would create the necessary exchanges just as it has in other industries if left free by the government, provided the marketplace is open to all insurance companies and all insurance seekers, including the 85% whose sub-efficient, high cost plans are protected under the President’s proposal.  Although Obama sang a paean to ‘competition’, Senior Advisor David Axelrod later clarified the administration will do nothing to open the 50 state-regulated insurance markets.

- What is most odious about this plan, particularly the version in Senator Max Baucus’ Finance committee, who according to some should not be leading this effort because of his ties to insurers and pharmaceutical companies [3], is the maze of penalties and subsidies designed to direct consumer and small business behavior [4].  Behavior modification through economic policy comes with a heavy price: the invidious loss of freedom.  Obama and Baucus intend to oblige small companies and the “irresponsible” self-insuring young to purchase insurance … which insurance can only be government approved … which purchase will be subsidized with tax credits … which subsidies will be financed with surcharges on insurance companies and penalties on non-participating companies (take that you entrepreneurs) … which surcharges and penalties are to be defined by Congress … which … 

Only the left thinks in such convulsions. 

While Obama and the Democrats identified the problem correctly, and should be credited with focusing national attention on it, they are building their solution on the vaporous fantasy that government can direct human action with tax policy, penalty, and fiat.   

Their plan increases demand on insurance and health care by forcing 30 million new consumers into the system, but does nothing to increase supply.  It addresses less than one-fifth of the population, and ignores the structural costs driven throughout the system by the existing coverage of the other four-fifths.  It turns a blind eye to the absence of competitive forces that could otherwise fundamentally improve efficiency and lower costs in both markets.  And it expands government at the expense of our freedoms.   

Is the new President campaigning against Christianity or is he only trying to be inclusive and respectful of other faiths?  This is the question that discomfits Americans who had always learned and always believed in the Christian tradition and foundation of our country.  To respect all faiths is a laudatory grace; to deny the influence and spirit of a faith practiced by the overwhelming majority of the country one leads is disgraceful.

Consider that in June 2006 Obama said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation – at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”  (FactCheck; YouTube).  And in July 2007 he told CBN News, “America is no longer just a Christian nation”.

One might tolerate a candidate’s flirtations with studies in comparative religions, perhaps in recognition of the changing religious profile of the United States of late (largely due to a failed immigration policy), or one might rationalize his reaction to the doctrinaire and often unforgiving positions assumed by the evangelist wing of Christianity which for too long meddled beyond their mission to save souls to encumber the politics of the GOP.  But a President’s responsibility requires a supererogation in contrast to a candidate’s ambitions, and a requisite honoring of American history, tradition, and the realities of the super-majority Christianity comprises in our country.

Yet, as President, Obama recently carried his three year message while in Turkey, “ ‘One of the great strengths of the United States’ is that it does not consider itself ‘a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.’ ” (CNN)  No, Mr. President, the great strength of the United States is this: because we are a Christian nation we are tolerant of other faiths as long as they are bound by the same ideals and set of values.  Contrast our tolerance and acceptance with nations who are openly and predominantly non-Christian, something you might have done, diplomatically, during your European trip to reaffirm Western ideals.

Are we a Christian nation?  According to the American Religious Identification Survey 2008, 76% of the population identify themselves as Christian.  That is a number that can make even the most self-assured politician salivate.  The original colonies and territories of the United States, with the exception of Virginia, were settled by Europeans escaping persecution for Christian practices that were not tolerated in their home country.  And in a case before the Supreme Court, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892), Justice David Brewer declared in a unanimous decision, “These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”  Brewer’s argument is replete with examples that firmly establish the Christian tradition in American political practice.

What about the oft-cited “separation of Church and State” in the First Amendment?  Nowhere in the Constitution do these words appear.  The exact language is, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, …”  Secularist are all too eager to parse the phrase and conveniently leave out the second clause.  The original purpose was not to create a God-less society, but precisely the contrary: to protect free expression of faith.  Here is Thomas Jefferson, writing to the Danbury Baptists who were concerned about government intrusion into religion:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Obama’s solicitous exclamations about America’s non-Christianity that contradict majority American practice and belief, combined with a misreading of the Constitution by the followers of the former Constitutional professor are tragically being manifested in outrageous demands, that violate at least the spirit of the free exercise clause.  Before Obama accepted an invitation to speak this month at Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, The White House requested signs and symbols of Jesus Christ be covered up  (NBC News).  What is more unconscionable than that request is Georgetown’s acquiescence in it.  Perhaps the Catholics who run Georgetown forgot the words of St. Paul to Timothy, “If we deny Him, He will also deny us.”

Denial of our Christian heritage, denial of history, denial of the very values about which the President bragged to his Muslim interlocutors … we have managed to allow a Christian nation—yes Mr. President, it is—to be turned upside-down by a small minority who understand neither faith nor American tradition.

Michael Avari

http://bloggernews.net/120552

http://americancivility.us