Media Notice: Jim Babka will be appearing on the Jerry Hughes show today at 3:00 p.m. Eastern. Details are here.
Quote of the Day: “The only way to change the government is to elect the right people to office.” — the conventional wisdom
Subject: Did you just elect a new Congress?
If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times . . .
* Letters to Congress don’t work
* Pressure on Congress doesn’t work
* The only way to change things is to throw out the bums and elect the right people to replace them
Well, if that’s true then we must have just elected a new Congress, because a lot has changed since Election Day 2008.
Way back then the new unified Democratic government was supposed to gobble up a big chunk of the roughly one-half of our health care system that still operates under a partially free market. But look what’s happened instead . . .
The President has offered to drop the so-called “public option” that would have signaled the eventual end of private health insurance. He doesn’t have the votes in his own party to pass it.
Clearly, this retreat had to be the result of an election, right, because public pressure doesn’t work. Letters to Congress don’t work. The only thing that works is electing new people. So did you just elect a new President and Congress?
Oops! Nope. It didn’t happen. There were no new elections, no bums thrown out, and no “right” people elected to replace them. Instead . . .
We’ve just had a lot of letters to Congress and other forms of public pressure. And the result has been a steady stream of changes in the correct direction. In addition to the slow death of the socialized health insurance scheme we’ve also seen . . .
President Obama moderate his fraudulent use of the claim that 47 to 50 million Americans can’t afford health insurance. In his speech Wednesday night he removed the portion of that number who are illegal immigrants, and he’s started using the number 30-million instead.
Did this happen because we elected a new President who just happens to have the same name? No, it happened because of public pressure.
Pressure works. Elections don’t. Now we need a lot more of what works, and a lot less worrying about which set of bums we should elect to replace the current set of bums. Specifically . . .
We need to tell the politicians that the 30-million number is also inflated, because many of the people in that group can afford health insurance, they just don’t want to pay for it. And frankly, we don’t blame them given that the prices are inflated by government mandates. Health insurance in many places is simply a bad deal. So . . .
We also need to tell the politicians that almost everyone could afford health insurance if only the federal government would allow individuals and employers to buy health insurance across state lines, thereby avoiding state mandates that make insurance too expensive.
Finally, we need to tell the politicians that government insurance co-ops will eventually lead to the same result as the so-called “public option.” No government insurance co-ops!
Hey, you’re winning! But to win a complete victory, and not just a few partial retreats, you need to keep doing what works. You need to keep applying PRESSURE. Do you want to win? If so . . .
Use your personal comments to tell your elected Representatives that . . .
* Government insurance co-ops are as bad as the so-called “public option”
* The “30-million uninsured” number the President is now using is still inflated and misleading
* You want Congress to make it possible for individuals and employers to buy health insurance regulated by the state of their choice.
By the way, please notice that the Republicans have adopted this last item as their main proposal. They had little to say about it before, but they’re promoting it now because of . . . PRESSURE! It works. USE IT!
Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC Army. If you are attending a Tea Party this weekend, we have important information for you below my signature. To see how much your Army is growing please check out the Keeping Score report that follows.
Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Attending a Tea Party? DownsizeDC.org has flyers available for you to print and distribute.
* One flyer, which we released a few months ago, is a general Downsize DC flyer, inspired by the mood of the April 15th Tea Parties. It has a simple, but nice graphical flair. It comes “two-up” on a page (every sheet you print is actually two); just cut each page in half.
KEEPING SCORE REPORT
Your Downsize DC Army grew by 22 net new members since our last report. This brings our total growth for the year to 3,802. The Downsize DC Army now stands at 28,148, nearly 15% of the way between 28,000 and 29,000.
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