Here's the opening:
I am a law-abiding citizen and breast cancer survivor, and I completely disagree with the current move to nationalize health care. Dissent is not new to me. As a teenager I worked to abolish the draft. Now, as then, my dissent is as a thinking American, not a member of an "un-American mob."(Read the full text of "Dissent and Nationalization of Health Care".)
If government owns and pays for my health care, they own my body just as a farmer owns his cow. If government is paying, it will decide what kind of care I get and when I will get it. Under "free health care for all," access will diminish as lines lengthen, and my care may not be there when I really need it.
Although supporters of free-market health care reform lost a battle last night in the House vote, the war is not over -- it has merely shifted to the Senate.
Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com notes in "Is this the high-water mark for ObamaCare?":
The Democrats wheedled, cajoled, begged, and finally abandoned its defense of abortion -- truly a watershed moment -- in order to get their version of ObamaCare passed ...in the House of Representatives, where they enjoy a 75-seat majority. In the end, they could only muster a five-vote win on Nancy Pelosi's bill out of that strong majority. Until this week, most had assumed that any ObamaCare bill would pass the House easily, but that the fight would be in the Senate.Morrissey also discusses some of the other procedural hurdles before ObamaCare can become law.
So what does this 220-215 vote tell us? Capitol Hill Democrats know that this bill is an albatross. It's true that Pelosi was able at the end to negotiate votes to allow a few at-risk Democrats that supported the bill to oppose it in the final vote, but even that tells a tale of fear and consciousness of unpopularity. The razor-thin vote, as well as a number of earlier, more sincere defections, show that this bill was a radical and expensive approach to fix a 13% problem -- and even most of the Democrats know it.
...We always thought the fight was in the Senate, so the only real surprise yesterday was how weak Pelosi actually was on ObamaCare.
The fight is far from over.
So thank you, Hannah, for speaking out and for mentioning FIRM in your OpEd byline!
