Yesterday, a private health insurance carrier doubled your monthly premium. This increase follows similar decisions by another carrier who insures your vehicle and home. Simultaneously, the cost of all medical services has risen ferociously, thanks to your  Federal Government. After decades of his predecessors’ failed attempts, Lyndon (God Help Us) Johnson and his Congress pushed Medicare through and the rest is hideous socialist history. Everything that man touched was foul beyond description. For that matter, everything that government touches is some form of malfeasance. Your parents had no insurance. They were poor. By comparison to them, the poor today are rich. But your parents paid for your birth and later for the occasional Doc. You can’t recall any family member hospitalized. Little by little, things changed. Married with four children, you took part in group insurance plans at work. Those plans had one goal — protect your family against catastrophic illness. For the cost of run-of-the-mill hospital visit, in addition to your monthly premiums, you paid 20% and insurance paid 80%, with an out-of-pocket limit. You paid for years with no hospital visits. Insurance didn’t pay doctors or dentists. You paid them direct. In particular, pediatricians were a monthly expense — a necessary cost of living year after year. You didn’t begrudge the expense. But somewhere along the way, people decided they didn’t want to be responsible for the state of their health, much less pay for it. Somewhere along the way, healthcare became a right. And right on schedule, the Healthcare Industrial Complex grew exponentially, becoming a giant bureaucracy. Now, doctors submit to essentially being employees of HMO’s. A night’s stay in ER costs thousands. Pharma dominates TV, drumming disease after disease and drug after drug. As healthcare rules the national scene, the United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country but is the sickest country among those same nations. According to recent reports, the US has “the highest rates of deaths from avoidable or treatable causes and the highest maternal and infant death rates.” * The U.S.consumes approximately 80 percent of the global opioid supply. And coincident with RNA vaccine proliferation, all-cause mortality is through the roof. ** You can thank the Federal Government — all governments, really — for skyrocketing health costs as just one part of the 37 trillion dollar disaster plaguing America. Medicare is just one atrocity. Taxation is another. Congress taxes the hell out of people. Congress spends and spends, borrows and borrows — and when the income isn’t enough, issues more debt — keeps spending — and prints and prints more money — creating inflation. Inflation steals. It sucks more money from the people in the form of rising prices for all of life’s necessities. There is no excuse for this wrongdoing. Robin Hood’s enemy, King John, who inflicted ruinous taxes on the poor of 1377, was a cream puff compared to Congress. No one in America should pay taxes on wages. Consider what you pay — income tax, sales tax, property tax, capital gains tax, business tax and all manner of other taxes. Without an ounce of fiscal restraint, adding insult to injury, the Federal Government decides to divvy up your donations to thousands of recipients, foreign and domestic — picking winners and losers in the process. The mismanagement of the people’s money is nothing short of evil. For his crime, Bernie Madoff sat in prison for 11 years before his death. For their crimes, congressmen and congresswomen sit in revered seats in the People’s House to enjoy highly lucrative careers, jacking their jaws and voting on interminable bills that mostly place shackles on those who can least afford them. Whatever pain it causes, DOGE can’t work quickly enough to slash and burn the Fed’s size and return it to its Constitutionally enumerated jurisdiction. If Speaker Mike Johnson wants to make history, he should stand before his peers and accuse himself and his political pals for breaking their venerated oaths of office — “we, and those who came before us, are guilty of conducting a criminal charade — for driving this great country to ruin; and in doing so, we spit in the faces of those patriots who gave us their lives.” But you won’t hold your breath for that speech. He’s too busy sending emails complaining about the bad guys and the broken system. Of course, what he’s really doing is  asking for money. Duh.

* www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/health/us-health-care-spending-global-perspective/index.html

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHpvhZFvUl4

www.conventionofstates.com