If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.
By Shawn Tully, editor at large
July 24, 2009: 10:17 AM ET
http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/24/news/economy/health_care_reform_obama.fortune/index.htm
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.
A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.
(the rest of the article is here)
1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
5. Freedom to choose your doctors
The blog for Massachusetts Citizens for Life: the pro-life movement in the Bay State since 1973.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
article: "Too Many (Other) People"
(excerpt from this article)
As a left-leaning Rutgers law professor in the early 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that the Roe v. Wade abortion decision was the product of "concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of," she recalled in a recent New York Times Magazine interview.
Her expectation was that the purported right to abortion created in Roe "was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them."
Ginsburg doesn’t specify which parts of the human population "we" should cull, or how the creation of an abortion "right" would necessarily be a prelude to creation of a system in which abortion would be required in some circumstances. She told the Times that the question was effectively rendered moot by the Supreme Court's Harris v. McRae decision, which upheld a ban on Medicaid funding of abortion. That decision, handed down in 1980, indicated that her "perception" of the issue "had been altogether wrong," Ginsburg concludes.
But this means that there was an interval of roughly seven years during which Ginsburg, a well-informed and influential academic, believed that America was creating a eugenicist system in which abortion would help reduce "undesirable" populations – however those populations would be defined. This was what Roe had wrought, Ginsburg believed for several years, and if she ever experienced misgivings about it, she managed to keep them private.
Another question worth examining is this: Where did Ginsburg – a rising star in academe long before being tapped to fill the Rosa Klebb seat on the Supreme Court – get the impression that American policy-making elites were discussing the use of welfare subsidies to bring about the attrition of "undesirable" populations?
If I may be permitted a modest venture in speculation, I’d suggest that Ginsburg, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, became at least superficially acquainted with the writings of John Holdren or of like-minded people in the most militant branch of the population control movement.
(... read more -- excerpt from this article)
As a left-leaning Rutgers law professor in the early 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that the Roe v. Wade abortion decision was the product of "concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of," she recalled in a recent New York Times Magazine interview.
Her expectation was that the purported right to abortion created in Roe "was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them."
Ginsburg doesn’t specify which parts of the human population "we" should cull, or how the creation of an abortion "right" would necessarily be a prelude to creation of a system in which abortion would be required in some circumstances. She told the Times that the question was effectively rendered moot by the Supreme Court's Harris v. McRae decision, which upheld a ban on Medicaid funding of abortion. That decision, handed down in 1980, indicated that her "perception" of the issue "had been altogether wrong," Ginsburg concludes.
But this means that there was an interval of roughly seven years during which Ginsburg, a well-informed and influential academic, believed that America was creating a eugenicist system in which abortion would help reduce "undesirable" populations – however those populations would be defined. This was what Roe had wrought, Ginsburg believed for several years, and if she ever experienced misgivings about it, she managed to keep them private.
Another question worth examining is this: Where did Ginsburg – a rising star in academe long before being tapped to fill the Rosa Klebb seat on the Supreme Court – get the impression that American policy-making elites were discussing the use of welfare subsidies to bring about the attrition of "undesirable" populations?
If I may be permitted a modest venture in speculation, I’d suggest that Ginsburg, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, became at least superficially acquainted with the writings of John Holdren or of like-minded people in the most militant branch of the population control movement.
(... read more -- excerpt from this article)
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Economic ruin from our aborted generation
The media occasionally speaks about "aging populations" as though an entire society naturally ages, but what that really speaks of are declining birthrates and aborted children. If we didn't abort an entire generation of taxpayers, there wouldn't be a social security crisis. If we let the country's population grow instead of letting them die at the hands of the abortion industry, we would have an expanding economy and not a contracting one.
Look at the careful words chosen by this British editorial:
All those terms mean societies that dislike children, countries that have ruined their young and have thrown them away rather than let them grow and prosper. Women deserve better than abortion, and deserve more options and real choices than the ones society is foisting upon them now. Even in the face of this major 'demographic winter' and 'aging' of our population, what message do colleges send to pregnant women in their midst? Right now, a pregnancy center is in every major community and yet how many women realize how many good choices are all around them?
We will turn this 'winter' into a spring of life only by continuing the battle, pushing for real choices for women, supporting families and once again loving every life.
Look at the careful words chosen by this British editorial:
No doubt Ireland has been the victim of a savagely tight monetary policy - given its specific needs. But the deeper truth is that Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the US, and Japan are in varying states of fiscal ruin, and those tipping into demographic decline (unlike young Ireland) have an underlying cancer that is even more deadly. The West cannot support its gold-plated state structures from an aging workforce and depleted tax base.
All those terms mean societies that dislike children, countries that have ruined their young and have thrown them away rather than let them grow and prosper. Women deserve better than abortion, and deserve more options and real choices than the ones society is foisting upon them now. Even in the face of this major 'demographic winter' and 'aging' of our population, what message do colleges send to pregnant women in their midst? Right now, a pregnancy center is in every major community and yet how many women realize how many good choices are all around them?
We will turn this 'winter' into a spring of life only by continuing the battle, pushing for real choices for women, supporting families and once again loving every life.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Tad on Frozen Embryos
The question of what to do with frozen embryos has been a dicey one in pro-life circles, considering the numbers of children frozen and the snowflake babies who are born through this process. While not encouraging more embryo donation, and thus more life destruction through the process, Fr. Tad explains that the most moral thing to do would be to keep them frozen in the hope that science can one day rescue them or that they die naturally and peacefully rather than turn them over to science for barbaric testing or killing them without giving them a chance.
Obama appoints advisor who wanted forced abortions and sterilizations
In a stunning appointment, Barack Obama has appointed John Holdren, a man who in 1977 co-authored a book that advocated forced abortions and forced sterilizations as a way to control so-called 'overpopulation'
Holden, of course, taught locally at Harvard.
Then again, it's one thing to be a bumbling soothsayer but quite another to underestimate the resourcefulness of mankind enough to ponder how "population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution," as Holdren did in "Ecoscience" in 1977. (article)
Holden, of course, taught locally at Harvard.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Vietnamese abortions skewing births
Matching the trends in other countries like China and India, Vietnam is now seeing an alarming rise in the number of male births. Where normal and natural births achieve harmony, peace and order, abortion sows division, despair and chaos. No one knows what the effect of having all these extra men will be, ones without a potential spouse and in a part of the world prone to major military conflicts.