Buckeye RINO

I generally blog about what I want to blog about.  I generally prefer to blog about Ohio issues instead of national ones.  Lately, I’ve been on fire over gambling, both Strickland’s flip-flop, and the pending casino ballot issue.

However, my friends and family members have been pestering me day after day to blog about health care reform.  My friends and family are not nearly as political as I am, so it’s unusual for me to see them so fired up and passionate about something political.  My youngest sister (I’ve got 4 sisters and 5 brothers) is the only one out of all these people who hasn’t fully formed an opinion on the topic of health care.  Everyone else who’s emailed me is adamantly opposed to the direction that Obama and the Democrats are taking us in.  About two weeks ago, I emailed them all back and said that I’d already blogged about my own stance on health care last year, along with a string of blog entries expressing my agony that our nation is marching down the path of socialism.  My health care stance basically stipulates that we need to switch from a captive marketplace to a free marketplace where consumers make the choices among private sector competitors, similar to the auto insurance marketplace.  I encouraged them all to contact their Congressional representatives to let them know how they felt about the direction of health care reform, but I told them I was weary of the topic, myself, and didn’t plan to blog much more about it.

Yesterday at Michelle Malkin’s blog, I happened to see an eye-popping video of an AARP meeting in Dallas, so I included a brief blurb about it on my blog.  Voila.  I wrote my obligatory health care post.  ‘Nuff said.

I moved on to other tasks around the house, with a load off my mind.

Later, I came back to my computer to see what was going on in Ohio’s blogosphere, hoping to see who else might be writing something about the gambling issues in Ohio when I saw a post from Dayton OS that got me totally riled up.  It wasn’t about gambling.  It was about health care.  The Democrats are telling each other lies about the opposition to Obamacare.

How thick-skulled the Democrats are.  No matter how much they’re  bludgeoned with the truth about how we really feel about Obamacare, the truth doesn’t get through their thick skulls.

So here I am, seething with anger over Democrat lies, blogging about health care reform.

What lies are the Democrats telling each other?  That opposition to Obamacare is nothing but an astroturf campaign wholly concocted by the health insurance lobby, and there is no genuine grassroots opposition to Obamacare.

A conclusion that Democrats draw from their own lies is that there’s no need for Congressional representatives to pay any attention to any feedback from constituents on Obamacare.  They’ve convinced themselves that the grassroots all want Obamacare, no matter how much noise we make.

I can’t think of a greater dereliction of a Congress member’s duty than to turn a deaf ear to the people.  If opposition to Obamacare is nothing but astroturf, then overwhelm it.  Have all 535 members of Congress hold town hall meetings in their hometowns all over the country at the exact same times on the exact same days so that there’s no way that the health care lobbyists can be in all places at once.  If opposition turns up everywhere at once, then you’d better be listening, because that’s grassroots, not astroturf.  But if members of Congress, instead, are derelict in their duty by turning a deaf ear to the people, and letting us have no voice, I swear I’ll trek to Capitol Hill this fall and make some noise. I might even bring a pitchfork with me.

I am not in league with health care lobbyists.  If anyone cares to read my blog entry on health care reform, I expressed displeasure with the health care lobby and with pay-to-play legislators who got us to the point where we are now, with a very uneven playing field in a very uncompetitive health care marketplace.  I’m not against health insurers earning a profit in a free marketplace, but we don’t have a free marketplace.  We have a captive marketplace.  To get to a free marketplace, we have to repeal scores of laws that legislators enacted in exchange for campaign contributions from the health care lobby.  The real reason we can’t have the health care reform that Americans want is that members of Congress are too concerned about campaign fundraising and holding on to power.  Legislators won’t get PAC donations for repealing sweetheart deals so that we can free the marketplace.

It’s an insult to me to suggest that I, as an opponent of Obamacare, have been bought by the health care lobby for the sole purpose of an astroturf campaign.  I first started talking about marketplace reforms of health care when I first ran for state rep in 2002.  My health care plan blog entry from last year was very nearly a cut-and-paste of the same health care plan I touted in a campaign email newsletter that I circulated during my 2nd state rep run back in 2004.  I staked out my position on the issue long before Obama ran for President, let alone before Obamacare was placed before us.  No health care lobby has been orchestrating my opposition to Obamacare.  It’s Congress and the state legislatures that have been influenced decade after decade by the health care lobby that we’ve arrived at the mess we’re in.  It’s the height of hypocrisy for legislators to suggest that Obamacare’s opponents have all been bought by lobbyists.

“Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation.”

What a crock!  We’d like a conversation to begin, and we’d like it to be open and frank, and we’d like to be a part of it.

If Democrat members of Congress embrace these lies, and turn a deaf ear to us, despite their Constitutional duty to represent us, there won’t be a conversation.  If that happens, things could get really ugly.