“The moral test of
government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn
of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the
elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the
needy and the handicapped.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey
I’ve been hearing that
Humphrey quote since I became a political activist, always from
liberals who insist there must be higher taxes or the government
will just have to keep wasting money on increasing the power and
privilege of the ruling government class, instead of passing the
moral test.
Let me rephrase. The
competence test of government is how that government manages not to
completely screw up services to those in the dawn of life and the
twilight of life, along with everybody else, especially the sick.
The most recent report
from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ranks
Massachusetts one of the worst in the nation for children’s welfare
(despite a tax burden that is one of the highest in the nation).
Taking care of children born into bad home environments is a problem
in all states, with the hard choices of letting them take their
chances with neglectful or abusive parents or placing them in foster
care that has its own risks. But Massachusetts has a history of
getting it wrong, over and over.
One of the reasons is a
welfare system with high incentive to have children that will need
government intervention in their lives because the parents are
irresponsible from the beginning: unknown/absentee fathers, mothers
using drugs and/or alcohol while pregnant and afterward. What is
society to do? Government taking children from their mothers is
scary power; finding good foster homes becomes essential, and in
Massachusetts, some of the foster parents have themselves been
abused by the system, receiving little backup for the good that they
do.
Recent headlines tell
of a child who was returned to his mother and never checked on; he
is missing now and presumed dead. Of course, children in foster
homes have been harmed, too.
Expenditures for
vulnerable children, and for the mentally ill, are not controversial
until the money doesn’t get the job done. Our state government makes
it seem as if nothing will ever be done to address this problem,
which only gets worse as modern society deteriorates.
Society is doing better
caring for those in the twilight of life, at least until Medicare
and Social Security run out of money. Rather than dwell on this
inevitability, let’s move on to something more easily fixable:
ObamaCare, which if left to its legal implementation, will result in
the death of people who suddenly lose the insurance they’ve been
using for essential treatment.
President Obama
unilaterally making changes in the law as its flaws become obvious
is no solution, either, since that arrogance, if unchecked, could
permanently damage our republic in which Congress, not the
president, amends the laws it has passed.
It’s time for our
elected representatives to step up and assert their constitutional
authority while they fix the problems of the so-called Affordable
Care Act (ACA, aka
ObamaCare). This means you, Congressman Tierney:
During the debate in 2009 you, along with the president, told us
that if we like our health insurance, we can keep our
health
insurance.
A few months later, I
received a notice that my Medicare Advantage program had been
canceled. I found another policy for my small business but last week
received a notice that this policy isn’t allowed by ObamaCare
because it doesn’t cover pediatric dental care or childbirth classes
for our three employees, all over 60 without dependents. I’m told by
Health Services Administrators that even if they can work around the
new mandates, the federal law’s new rating factors will affect small
business premiums.
Since RomneyCare
acquired numerous expensive mandates after Gov. Romney left, our
health insurance policies are already required to cover some of the
things that policies in other states don’t yet have. So, if it makes
us feel better: Since our health insurance costs are already the
highest in the nation, the new impact here may not be as great as in
other states.
Access to health
insurance has been blocked by the terrible design of the Obama
system, which has negatively impacted the design of the
once-accessible Massachusetts system. We recently learned that some
of the software was outsourced to Belarus, which made me think of a
Dilbert cartoon strip in which his company outsourced software
to a Third World country named Elbonia. Its citizens live hip-deep
in mud and take turns pretending to be computers for another
Elbonian to program for foolish American companies.
The Obama
Administration has just again, unilaterally, delayed the ObamaCare
penalty on larger employers. Additionally, people with individual
policies that don’t conform have been given a year to find new ones.
I called Congressman Tierney and our two U.S. senators to suggest
they demand a delay in this assault on small businesses, too. Then,
they might as well just repeal the entire “Affordable Care”
abomination (ACA) and start over — before many more Americans find
themselves without health care and possibly, therefore, prematurely
in the twilight of their lives.
