Just Admit Defeat Already, Obamacare Should Be Reformed, Not Repealed

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – One of the things that we talk about here on this show that I think distinguishes it from others is that there is no partisan solution.  First of all, the conservative does not believe there is a political solution to life.  Let me repeat that.  The conservative does not believe that there is a political solution to life’s problems.  Life’s problems have to be experienced and worked out by individuals.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  One of the things that we talk about here on this show that I think distinguishes it from others is that there is no partisan solution.  First of all, the conservative does not believe there is a political solution to life.  Let me repeat that.  The conservative does not believe that there is a political solution to life’s problems.  Life’s problems have to be experienced and worked out by individuals.  Therefore, it would necessarily follow that the conservative does not believe that you are going to solve most problems politically.  Most problems inherently are human conditions, human problems.  Politics is something that humans do.  We are capable of solving and fixing our problems without being ordered or protected by our city councilmen, our mayors, our members of congress, governors, or senators.  If there’s a country that’s trying to invade us and stop us from solving our problems by stealing our property and our liberties, you got me.  Then we’ll need a government.  Or maybe there’s a band of marauders that’s coming from Texas into Louisiana that’s going to steal our wealth.  Okay, then we need sheriffs.  Yes, we need a government.

I do not deny that government is necessary.  I also am not an anarchist.  I keep seeing little blurbs out there on the internet characterizing me and this show as being anarchists.  That is the farthest thing — so anarchy, -archy meaning control or rule, and an- meaning none.  I am not an anarchist.  As a matter of fact, I subscribe to the highest and greatest power known to man, and that’s the power of God.  God and what he has taught or allowed man or caused man to learn, and boy should we heed what he has allowed us to learn.  That is the highest governing authority on Earth and that’s who I answer to.

In the affairs of men, there is corruption, there is deceit, there are lies, and most of all, ladies and gentlemen, there is what Bastiat called plunder.  You can call it plunder, you can call it theft, you can call it grift — I like grift because no one else uses grift.  There was a movie starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack back in the 90s called The Grifters.  It was actually pretty good.  There is grift, there is outright theft, call it whatever you want  Men will always conspire with one another to perform this most deceitful of all activities, which is to steal the produce and fruits of another man’s labor.  To me there is nothing more injurious short of taking life or preventing the exercise of one’s God-given freedom or liberty than to steal the fruits of a man’s labor.  That is your labor.  That is your product.  That is your produce.  It’s not right when man does it and it’s certainly not right when government does it.  You know what makes it worse?  When people participate in it and use government to do it.  You have man doing it and using government as the tool.

This is what the Affordable Care Act is designed to do.  It is designed to pilfer, to grift, to theft, to steal what it is that you have earned, take it from you, and give it to someone else who has not.  All paper systems are designed to effect this transfer.  That’s what they are designed to do.  You can believe any other ideological concern you would like, but at the end of the day, all paper systems, and we have quite possibly the grandest paper system in the history of Earth.  Both parties are in on it.  Both parties are in on it.  I have been telling you for three years that it is only a matter of time before “conservatives” and “Republicans” mosey up to the bar, reconcile themselves to the idea that we are stuck with government-run healthcare, so we might as well get in on it.  We might as well get our share of the pie.  We might as well have our own preferred manner of dealing with it.  Then the eternal struggle will continue and you will have all been co-opted in it.  The struggle will go, [mocking] “Well, if we could just get the healthcare systems out of the hands of the liberals and let our kids run it, you just wait and see.  Our government kids are going to be better at running it than their government kids.  Their government kids are communists and socialists.”  Hey, you out there thinking that right now, good luck with that.

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I have been keeping my eyes open.  I do a lot of browsing around, folks, a lot more than you can ever know, looking for stories like the one that I have here in my hand.  Actually, young Evan assisted me in finding this one.  This is from The Daily Beast.  By the bye, Eric, ask Evan why he was hanging out at such a left-wing screed promoter as The Daily Beast.  As long as he’s doing it on my behalf, that’s okay.  If he’s hanging out there because he’s a Daily Beast troll, we’ve got a problem.  We’re going to have to have an intervention here.  Bear in mind what I just said to you and listen to this.  If you don’t know who David Frum is, he was a speech writer for President George W. Bush.  He is a contributor to the Clinton News Network and several other media outlets.  He is known as a “conservative,” even though there are many that say, [mocking] “He’s a traitor.  He’s not one of us.”  Well, he is what you would call an establishment Republican.  We all knew this was going to happen.  If you’re listening to this show for any amount of time, you knew this, check that, you knew this was happening.  Now they’re getting a little more bold.  Headline: “Why It’s Time To Start Talking About Reforming, Not Repealing, Obamacare.”  There you have it.

[reading]

No matter who becomes president in 2016, stripping Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans will not be an option. It’s time to start discussing how to reform—not repeal—Obamacare.

[end reading]

Mike:  So it’s now part of the conservative project to make Obamacare better.  Now the conservatives are supposed to pull one of these moves that I’ve been talking about for the last couple months here.  Some editors, like my friend Dan McCarthy at The American Conservative Magazine, have been encouraging people to hoist the white flag of surrender up the pole and make deals with these people.  Make your peace with it and jump in and try to make it better.  Again, I’m going to reiterate that that means our entire life has been an exercise in futility.  All the things we believed heretofore have been now proven or we are about to admit that they are incorrect, and that we are saying it is now okay to participate in the grift.  It’s okay and we want to have a hand in participating in the paper system, which is designed, again, to do what?  Steal the property of someone that has legally and rightfully earned it and transfer it to someone who has not.

This is not about charity.  This is a rejection of charity.  Therefore, why in God’s holy name would I participate in it?  I am perfectly able, I am healthy, I am well, moderately financially well off (relatively speaking).  I am able to exact my own form of Christian charity, and I suspect most of you are.  Why would we join in on the government version of it?  It’s a racket.  It is theft.  It is immoral.  It is antithetical to a free society to participate in this.  Yet, we’re being told — folks, I’m going to tell you, we’re going to be in the minority.  We may be a minority that is gathering more to our historical and traditional way of thinking, but we’re going to be in the minority.  We’re going to lose.  The “right” is going to bail on this and they’re going to endorse and embrace exactly what it is I’m about to read to you, or something like this, that Frum and others are going to be promoting.

[reading]

Over the past month, as the Obamacare exchanges have bounced and crashed, some 400,000 Americans have enrolled in Medicaid or S-Chip, the children’s health program. The architects of the Affordable Care Act expected that about half the people who would gain coverage under the law would do so through Medicaid; about half through the much more publicized exchanges. Website troubles and high prices have depressed exchange sign up. But Medicaid sign-ups are trundling along in half the states.

[end reading]

Mike:  Then he gives some of the statistics on how wonderful it is.  [mocking] “Man, person after person, state after state, they’re signing up for Medicaid.  It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread!  Wait a minute, it’s the greatest thing since free medicine.”

[reading]

Maybe President Paul Ryan or President Ted Cruz or President Sarah Palin will be bolder than Ronald Reagan. Maybe Republicans in Congress can face the heat on a scale never dared in 1995 or 2011. Maybe. But much more likely … no. No, they won’t.

The irony of course is that Medicaid is a poorly structured program that delivers notoriously disappointing results. It follows the Medicare fee-for-service model, but typically pays for services at such very low rates that Medicaid clients discover they have health care access only in theory, not in fact.

[end reading]

Mike:  Now we get to the plan, to the scheme.  Avik Roy, former health advisor to Mitt Romney has a solution to this.  Here it is.  You ready, folks?  Are you listening?  Mark this down.  This is the solution.

[reading]

Let’s build a new health program for low-income Americans, one that pays primary care physicians $150 a month to see each patient, whether they are healthy or sick. That’s what so-called “concierge doctors” charge, and it would give Medicaid patients what they really need: first-class primary care physicians to manage their chronic cardiovascular and metabolic conditions. Then throw on top of that a $2,000-a-year catastrophic plan to protect the poor against financial ruin. The total annual cost of such a program would be $3,800 per person, 37 percent less than what Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion costs.

[end reading]

Mike:  Now we’re going to use government and we’re going to lift $3,800 per person from people that have rightfully earned it.  We’re going to transfer it to people, through the federal government, so that we can purchase them concierge physicians. If you’re going to make that your cause célèbre, and if you’re going to pursue it that way, why do you have to use the power of the State to do it?  Wouldn’t it be easier, wouldn’t it be administered better, wouldn’t’ you not only be delivering care but be delivering a little dose of community, a little dose of love at the same time if instead of asking government to do this you just acknowledge: Look, there are people that are going to need charity, going to need health services.  Some of us have recognized this and we hold fundraisers and do drives and donate at church.  We’ve taken care of this problem.  We don’t need the State to get involved.  No one is arguing this point, folks.  I searched the entire landscape.  I can’t find anyone that is arguing that point save maybe for a few people that have been recently and unceremoniously probably drummed out of certain churches.

[reading]

That’s one plausible idea. Other ideas include expansions of state and local clinic systems . . .

[end reading]

Mike:  If a local clinic is going to expand, that’s the local clinic’s job to do that.  That’s the citizens that live locally’s job.  Again, like the guy that called yesterday that was a town manager in Texas, he said: Mike, I want to tell you, you’re right about that decentralizing, but we can’t have Obamacare on a local level.  It won’t work there, either.  It’s just as inefficient locally as it is nationally.  I don’t know if you run the numbers out of that’s true to a point; however, he is right in theory, and I think he is right in construct.  It would be improper, and I would say self-defeating, to say: Okay, we need our local town councils to get together to do this.

No, you need the local Kiwanis Club to get together to do this.  You need the local Lions Club.  You need the local Elks, the BPOE, Benevolent Protective Order of Elks, if there are any left out there.  You need the local Catholic Church.  You need the local Baptist and Methodist and Lutheran churches.  You need all of them.  You need the local Jewish synagogue.  You might even need the local temple.  In other words, the only way to effectively do this and to remove the paper system from it and the opportunity — once the opportunity is introduced into the system, the theft is going to happen — is if it is done community by community.  It’s not as though this is impossible.  This was done before.  We may not have x-ray machines and CAT scanners and what have you, but it was done before exactly in the manner being described.  Frum concludes:

[reading]

Whatever action is taken, however, will require a new law that does more than simply annul Obamacare. I’ve been pounding this drum for a long time, and it needs to be pounded some more. Obamacare is a fact— a malfunctioning fact, like so much of the rest of the American healthcare system, yet a fact all the same.

[end reading]

Mike:  Folks, I’m going to pause right there because I could do an entire discourse on calling the American healthcare system a system indicates part of your problem.  That’s part of the problem.  It’s a system, really?  Who designed it?  Who was the architect of it?  Is there an architect that’s still designing it?  Did a market design it?  Probably not.  Is a market and the price mechanism controlling it?  Probably not.  If a market and price mechanism were controlling it, would we call it a healthcare delivery system?  No, we’d call it how we get bread at the supermarket.  We’d call it how I get black angus certified filet mignon at the butcher’s.  That’s what we’d call it.  Is there a beef delivery system?  If there is, I’m not aware of it.  Here’s a good one.  Is there a beer delivery system?  Do you see the point?  [mocking] “Yeah, but healthcare is different from beer.”  Is it?  Says who?  Who made it that way?  Oh, maybe the people that invented and are running the system.

[reading]

Policy cannot realistically be made by dismissing such interests. They have gained something they will think is worth protecting. They will have the votes to protect it. If reform is needed, and it is, they will have to be offered something better.

Repeal is a fantasy. Reform is the task ahead.

[end reading]

Mike:  In other words, jump in the big government hot tub with your little government intentions and be happy.  There you go, folks.  I’m telling you that Frum is more correct on the future than I am.  I am not going to be in the majority anytime soon.  It doesn’t make me incorrect, it just makes me not popular, shall we say.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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