Curmudgeon's Corner

Concepts or Specifics?

Posted by Al Campbell on Oct. 2, 2009

Healthcare, Political, Quality of Life, U.S.

Congress continues to work its way through the muck of health care and health insurance reform.  This has been an arduous process and rightly so since it impacts every person in our country.  This has not been a pretty process since politics is not pretty, and since this is all about politics and virtually nothing about our health care.

As the citizens began to gain an understanding of what was or wasn't included, and about where we were being pushed, an amazing transformation began taking place in our country.  Where we had earlier been able to gain access to some of the specifics involved, and whereas that permitted some citizen-based debate, we find ourselves largely shut out of the details today.

That, of course, was the solution for the "angry mob" situation that Congress found itself confronting in what passes for a 'town hall" meeting environment in today's world.  If the people were made angry by their possession of the details, the solution obviously was to withhold those details and thus disarm the citizens.

That this option was even considered, much less put into place, tells us much about what we have for a representative government.

This approach is being carried multiple steps further with the very real possibility being that specific bill language will not even be crafted before Congress votes.  Congress will then be voting on conjecture and vague promises of what the vote will create, but, of course, the angry mob won't have a clue...and that is the way our representatives want it.  The real substance can then be written behind closed doors without the troublesome light of day involved.

Voters will go to bed some evening only to awaken to a new world of health care and health care financing except we won't know how that new world will look when it actually comes into being, nor will we have had anything to say about it.  We will simply be made subject to it.

Of course, those who represent us will not subject themselves and their families to this health care that they've reformed for us.  Amendments that would cause this have not even been permitted a vote.

We're now being told that the Senate Finance Committee completed its work early this morning and that Sen. Reid (D-NV) has scheduled the "debate" and vote for mid-October.  Do you really think that we will be given time to review the actual bill before the vote?  Of course we know the answer,  How could we review the bill when it will not have been crafted in time for that review, and when it is the desire of leadership that we be deprived of any review or any real input?

One more step down that slippery slope has taken place and most of us were asleep when it happened.  Our Congress is maddening.  It has subverted our representative form of government by refusing us the information necessary to enable us to inform our representatives of our desires.

This would be farcical were it not so critical to us and our posterity.  Once this is begun, where will it stop?  Every small erosion of our rights takes something from us forever; we are never able to recover the ground we lost.  My thoughts will likely be reviewed by those who disagree as being the rantings of the typical conservative, and that is to be expected.  Thoughtful discussion and give and take were the earlier victims of this form of "representative" government; an earlier step down the slippery slope.

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The Curmudgeon Blog today is titled "2016 Olympics In Rio".