Barack And Michelle Disagree On Health Care Reform
August 21, 2009 · carl · Print This Article
The following is an update to an article we did a while ago, before the debate about health care reform started to heat up.
The “free everything for everybody” propaganda that Barack Obama is spouting is a far different scenario than the plan Michelle Obama and David Axelrod put into place at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Yes, this is the same David Axelrod who sent out all those “fishy” e-mails to folks who had never contacted the White House.
The same ones that Major Garrett of Fox News asked Robert “I’m a know-nothing blithering idiot” Gibbs about.
Michelle Obama is on unpaid leave from her $317,000 a year job as a vice-president of the University Of Chicago Medical Center.
She was making a mere $122,000 a year just before her husband got elected to the Senate.
Before she went on leave, Mrs. Obama was instrumental in having the hospital adopt a program known as the Urban Health Initiative.
The purpose of the plan is to steer people who don’t have adequate health insurance to other care facilities.
Opinion polls taken among Chicago area medical professionals at the time the plan was put into effect were highly critical, calling the plan a break with the medical center’s commitment to the community.
Many doctors also noted that the treatment the people turned away would receive would be inadequate, stating that the level of care at local medical clinics left much to be desired.
Barack Obama’s top political strategist, David Axelrod, co-owns the firm, ASK Public Strategies, who, after some urging from Michelle Obama, was hired by the hospital to try and sell the plan to the community as a better alternative.
Another Obama adviser and close friend, Dr. Eric Whitaker, took over the Urban Health Initiative when he was hired by the hospital.
So the man who is going to see to it that we all have access to top-notch health care is married to a woman who advocated a plan for the hospital she worked at to deny first-class health care to those who need it the most.
Can someone reading this please explain this to me?
Who will judge what level of health care someone receives?
Doctors, Barack Obama, government bureaucrats, Michelle Obama, David Axelrod, Nancy “you’re a bunch of Nazis” Pelosi, who??
And which combination of their third-rate medical plans will we end up with?
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The other day, I received an interesting and very instructive e-mail from my brother Jeff who lives in France. He asked me to share it with the readers of my blog. I think I will share it with you also.
“As an American who has been living in Europe for most of the last 20 years, one who has visited doctors numerous times in four different countries, whose two children were brought into this world in European hospitals (France and England), who has himself spent a week in a public British hospital, and who underwent an operation in a private British clinic, I think I can say a thing or two about health care in Europe.
“Our out of pocket expenses for the births? Zero, even though in France my wife spent 5 days in the hospital after the birth, which is standard, by the way.
“During the three years we lived in England, we never once paid for medicine for our children. Children get drugs for free in the UK. Visits to the GP are free for everybody.
“My expenses for the week in the NHS hospital? Zero.
“The cost of the operation in the private clinic? Zero, it was covered by my work insurance, as was the post-op physical therapy I needed.
“In Western Europe you would never be forced to sell your home in order to pay for your medical bills, as happens all too often in America when catastrophic illness strikes and the insurance company decides that your condition was ‘pre-existing’.
“The quality of the care? Mostly good. French hospitals are excellent, even the food is decent. The food at the NHS hospital was beyond awful, but then again most English food is pretty bad (though they do have great Indian food). At night, they were understaffed, but I am guessing that, apart from that place where Dr. House works, most American hospitals are understaffed at night, too.
“In short, in the US, you pay more, get less, and die younger than we do in Europe. What part of that don’t you understand?
“My fellow Americans, you have nothing to fear except those who would use fear to keep you enslaved to the myth of the might of the American health care system.”
Jeff Degan
What can I tell you? The guy is a Communist. Not only does he live in France, he actually likes it there. An eternal shame to our family’s good name. Let us boil down his seven paragraphs to their juicy essentials, shall we?
HEALTH CARE IN THIS COUNTRY SUCKS.
Here is (Excuse me, I meant to say, “Here was“) a golden opportunity for real reform and the idiotic Americans are screaming about socialism. Is it any wonder that we have become the laughingstock of the Western world?
Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
PS – I love English food!
It’s a nice anecdote Tom, but doesn’t correspond with the overall picture we see of Europe’s healthcare systems.
The healthcare systems in the UK and France are bankrupting their respective countries just like Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupting the US. The only difference is that they have resulted in higher taxes and lower pay in the healthcare industry. Oh yeah, and even with the government (taxpayers) paying for everything they still can’t compete with the responsiveness of the US healthcare system (even the WHO admits that). All that and Europeans still need to worry about the government’s rationing of health services.
While you may think healthcare in this country sucks, 85% of the rest of us are happy with it. Our system may need some work, starting with national competition between insurance companies and tort reform, but an overhaul of the current system to European-style, government-run healthcare is not the answer.
I intend to be fairly reticent in my comment to this, because it’s got the gears turning in my mind; however, I see a statement of this that I agree with very wholeheartedly, which is, “. . .but an overhaul of the current system to European-style, government-run healthcare is not the answer.”
I very much agree. American ingenuity and innovation is still not dead (not yet, in spite the gargantuan attempts to “dumb us down” and “dope us all up”: those drug companies need money for THEIR so-called ‘innovations’ after all, right? Yeah, right, legalized pushers is what those hacks are, but I stop there), and it sure seems to me that we ought to be able to come up with something, ANYthing that does NOT include a government-run Health Dare.