Excersising my right. . .

to write my senators and congress people and now I feel a little better.

Dear Mr. Bishop, (and Bennett and Hatch)

Yesterday I found out some information about some of the detritus buried in the stimulus plan.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators and Congress people should read these provisions and remove them from the final bill because they are dangerous to your health.

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” This provision in the stimulus package outlines how your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors. But, having these records maintained on a federal government system is lunacy. The scope of the federal government is already so large that it seems as though the early American anti-federalists had the right idea; increasing that scope to allow unelected federal bureaucrats to poke around in our private medical records is quite frankly an obnoxious idea to anyone who still values freedom over government intrusion.

But the bigger issue here is that this is really intended as an end-run around the debate on socialized medicine namely the "Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research." By implementing key provisions that will allow greater federal oversight of doctors, forbid doctors to make decisions without being "guided" by bureaucrats whose only interest is cutting costs (and for whom patient care is completely unimportant), and mandate rationing of care among the elderly, the Democrats are hoping to get Hillary-style health care ramrodded into our society without any discussion of it at all.

This has nothing to do with the economy. It's nothing less than a massive power grab aimed at one of the few American industries still operating in the black. Giving the federal government such extreme control of the health care industry under the guise that stimulating the economy demands this course of action is an outright lie, buried in a spending plan that the Democrats are obviously hoping is too massive to have permitted a careful reading.

Tom Daschle knows as well, or better, than anyone that it wasn't "Senate Protocol" that kept Hillary Clinton from selling a massive government health care program to Americans in the first place; it was the people. The more Americans were informed about government health care and what that would mean for their freedom, their choices, their privacy, and their right to go to the doctor without a federal bureaucrat standing by with a veto that would forbid them from getting the care they needed and wanted, the more Americans rejected it. And this attempt to sneak socialized medicine into our society without any debate at all is the sort of thing that, in better days, would have caused good men to throw boxes of taxed tea into the nearest harbor, if you get my drift.

I am outraged by this and I do NOT want these health care provisions in the final version of the stimulus bill.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Parish
Mendon, UT