Healthcare reform bumped by real issue: Who’s in charge

Tue, 09/29/2009 - 3:02pm
By: Letters to the ...

It isn’t about healthcare reform anymore. Not that it ever was. Depending on your perspective it was either about power and control or cost, quality and access.

The national healthcare argument has been relegated to the backseat because the front seat is now occupied by tyranny. The broader picture has moved beyond the healthcare debate and has been replaced by a national debate over government itself.

When the government threatens its own people with nuclear option, with ramming monumental change down our throats, with stifling democratic debate, and with engineering bills in such manner that not only can they be deceiving, difficult to understand, but can be conveniently interpreted and reinterpreted that the meaning of the debate itself becomes far less important than the tactics themselves. Listen carefully, pay attention and you will feel the shift.

It isn’t about healthcare reform anymore. The debate has shifted. It’s about fundamental change in our government and under what governmental structure we want to live our lives.

Barack Obama told us early on that this was precisely what he was about. Many of us chose not to listen. Are we listening now? Do we hear the drumbeat of change?

I was always under the impression that our Founding Fathers established a democratic republic with a strong emphasis on small-centralized government relegating the majority of power to the states.

A side-by-side comparison of the Founding Fathers’ vision and what we have today would be all too painful.

President Obama is moving the country far left very quickly and in doing so has forced us, We The People, to revisit the Constitution and ask ourselves what it is we want from our government.

The foundation of our government, the principles of leadership that we have embraced and prospered under for the past nearly two and one-half centuries, is crumbling under the weight of cynicism.

Some people like to point out that the free market system has failed us. I would ask them this: how would you know? We haven’t lived under a truly free market system for a long time. We have layered so much governmental regulation and control over the free market system that it is quite unrecognizable.

So, that begs the question, is it the free market system or government meddling that has failed us?

Marc Lugash

Peachtree City, Ga.

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