We do not have a health care crisis. Our health-care in this country is outstanding, and particularly here in Eastern Idaho. Portneuf Medical Center and their incredible staff provide superb care, as my family was reminded of just recently.

We can’t even truly say we have a health-care insurance crisis. I’ve not seen any better breakdown of the numbers than what Investor’s Business Daily printed a couple weeks ago. They pointed out that 85% of the population, or 258 million people, have health insurance. Of those, 89% are happy with the coverage their insurer provides, according to an ABC News poll.

They examined the most reliable figures of an estimated forty-seven million people who lack health care insurance. Of those, 20 million can afford to buy it, according to former CBO Director June O’Neill. About a third of the other 27 million are illegal aliens, while most of the rest are single and under 35 and choose not to have health insurance.

IBD completes the math and points out, “When it's all whittled down, as few as 12 million are unable to buy insurance — less than 4% of a population of 305 million. For this we need to nationalize 17% of our nation's $14 trillion economy and change the current care that 89% like?”

Yes, there are some that lack insurance, but that hardly means that they don’t get acceptable or adequate health care. Law dictates that all who enter an emergency room must be treated. We currently have about 37 million Americans living below the poverty level, but Medicaid covers 55 million. We pay $350 billion a year to cover them. And as many as 11 million of the uninsured qualify for other government run programs, like Medicaid and SCHIP, and programs for the indigent. Many don’t bother to sign up for the programs even though they are eligible.

We can’t believe what the politicians are saying about current proposals congress is considering, for they either haven’t read them or don’t understand them. There are numerous cases cited recently of congressmen meeting with constituents where the constituents know more about the bill than the congressmen do. And the current bills “contradict the President’s assurances” that we will not be sacrificing our choices and freedom in health care, according to CNN Money. CNN proved it by analyzing the actual verbiage of the bills and identified five key freedoms we lose if either plan is passed.

First: the freedom to choose what coverage we have. The government will mandate what the plans cover. Second: the freedom for being rewarded for healthy living, as the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation, community rating where everyone’s accepted but higher premiums are charged. Third: the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage, as everyone is forced into a “one size fits all” plan. Fourth: the freedom to keep our existing plan. Private plans are grandfathered for five years, but if anything changes, they are forced into the government model. Fifth: freedom to choose your doctors. The government plan mandates we go through something called “medical home,” which functions like an HMO. You’re assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists, directly contradicting what the President is saying.

The CNN analysis concludes, “In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.”

We have more of a health-care cost crisis than anything. If Washington was serious about reducing costs they could start with true tort reform which would cap claims amounts, and pass a “loser pay” law that requires the loser in a suit to pay the legal costs. That has a tendency to sift out a lot of spurious claims. And they could allow health-insurance competition across state lines.

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” Our politicians should do the same. Their diagnosis is flawed, and their prescription will maim, not cure, the patient.

By Richard Larsen

Published – Idaho State Journal, 07/19/2009

Planned Parenthood is perhaps the most justifiably vilified contemporary social entity. And understandably so, especially to those of us who believe in “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” for this organization is perhaps the largest promoter of abortion in the United States. Yet before a “woman’s right to choose” became their mantra, their raison d’être was eugenics.

Eugenics is “the study of, or belief in, the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics),” according to Dictionary.com. In other words, eugenics is a radical, fascist concept of socially engineered Darwinism, governmentally enforced. The concept gained much prominence in the early 20th century, not only because of the evangelism of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, but because of what was happening in Germany at the time.

Margaret Sanger’s perspective on eugenics was to gradually rid the human population of “undesirables,” including minorities, the impoverished, and the “weak-minded,” thereby improving the remaining population. She spoke favorably of abortion as being an option to reduce undesirable populations, as evidenced by some of her radical statements, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” and by identifying those whose numbers should be reduced as “...human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ‘spawning... human beings who never should have been born. She forcefully argued for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.” An African-American pro-life group has declared, “That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment which Sanger considered ‘unfit’ cannot be easily refuted.” Lending credence to their claim, Sanger in 1939 organized The "Black" Project which sought restrictive reproduction by those she thought were “least intelligent and fit.”

The German version of eugenics not only articulated the eradication of undesirable races, they actually attempted it. They identified strata of the German population for elimination, including homosexuals, criminals, degenerates, dissidents, feeble-minded, idle, insane, religious, and weak. Conservative figures indicate over 100,000 people were killed for purposes of “cleansing the race,” along with 6 million Jews, and over 400,000 forcefully sterilized to prevent propagation.

Not surprisingly, many of Margaret Sanger’s’ early devotees were Nazi sympathizers, speaking at her rallies and contributing to her monthly publication. Sanger published several books which address the issue of eugenics and population control, and also contributed regularly to the Socialist Party newsletter.

Three recent events prompted me to delve into this nefarious history. The first was when Hillary Clinton accepted Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award earlier this year. Said Clinton, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision…taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her…Yet we know that Margaret Sanger’s work here in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done.” The natural follow-up question for her would be, “What parts of her vision would you like to see completed?”

The second event was an interview the New York Times conducted with sitting Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, where she said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.” You may want to read that quote again, especially the segment about “population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

The third event was when I realized who the Obama administration’s science tsar is. John Holdren, Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, co-authored a book with Paul Ehrlich, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, which argued that for the sake of population control, some women should be forced to abort their pregnancies and that the general population could be sterilized by lacing our water supply or food supply with infertility drugs. He also advanced the idea that single mothers and teen mothers should be forced to give their children to other couples to raise and that people who “contribute to social deterioration” can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility,” in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized. He recommended that a transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and dictate reproductive standards, enforced by an armed international police force.

As despicable as these concepts are to normal-thinking Americans, such radicalism seems to be prevalent in the administration, especially as ardently as the president supports abortion. All this lends credibility to the idea that those in power now are not “pro-choice,” but that they are indeed “pro-abortion.” It seems that eugenics is alive and well in the era of the Obama administration. And it raises the provocative question, should these people be in charge of American health care?