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By Dr. Paul Kengor

Obama's "Healthcare" Mandate - What Would Reagan Say

Editor’s note: Dr. Kengor will be a participant in an April 19-20 conference hosted by The Center for Vision & Values on “The Challenge 2012: The Divided Conservative Mind.”

The Center For Vision & Values

Grove City, PA --(Ammoland.com)- February 6 was the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth.

It comes at an appropriate time. February is also the month of Presidents Day and the birthday of Lincoln, the other Republican standard-bearer. Every Republican presidential candidate tries to claim the mantle of Reagan: “I believe as Ronald Reagan believed….”

Well, what did Ronald Reagan believe? It’s a question I get often. I’ve been giving a lecture titled, “What is a Reagan conservative?” I’ll be giving it again at the CPAC conference on Feb. 11 and our Center for Vision & Values conference in April. In that lecture, I lay out the core fundamentals of “Reagan conservatism.”

Some of those fundamentals have special relevance in light of the ongoing scandal known as the “Obama mandate;” that is, President Obama’s unprecedented “healthcare” decree mandating that all Americans—including Catholics and Catholic organizations— forcibly pay for contraception, sterilization, and birth-control drugs that cause abortions.

Two core Reagan fundamentals stand out:

1. Reagan’s belief in the sanctity and dignity of human life; and
2. Reagan’s thoughts on the “idea” of America.

On the first, Reagan insisted that without the right to life, there can be no other rights. The right to life is the first of all freedoms, without which other freedoms literally cannot exist.

“My administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land,” said Reagan in 1983. “And there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.”

For Reagan, that right to life began in the womb. It began at conception. As president, Reagan supported a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would have inserted into the Constitution these words: “the paramount right to life is vested in each human being from the moment of fertilization without regard to age, health or condition of dependency.” He favored providing every human being—at all stages of development—protection as “persons” with the “right to life” under the 14th Amendment.

That amendment never passed. Too bad. It would have killed Obama’s mandate, or at least posed a significant challenge.

In addition, Reagan extolled America as a country based on timeless, eternal values: on universal, God-given inalienable rights. Reagan gave innumerable statements on these rights, but I’m struck by one he gave way back in June 1952 at tiny William Woods College in Missouri.

There, Reagan said that America is “less of a place than an idea,” a place that resided deep in our souls. “It is simply the idea,” said Reagan, “the basis of this country and of our religion, the idea of the dignity of man, the idea that deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people so well as they can decide for themselves.”

Well, the Obama mandate imposes President Obama’s personal will upon all of the American people, and especially Catholics whose consciences dictate otherwise. The mandate violates something God-like and deep within the heart of religious believers who profess the dignity of man from the moment of conception—whose faith implores them not to violate that dignity.

President Obama, via his fiat, has instructed certain believers not only to go against their conscience and Church’s teachings but to subsidize the transgression.

In another speech years later, in August 1983, Reagan referred to Americans’ inalienable rights as “corollaries of the great proposition, at the heart of Western civilization, that every … person is a ressacra, a sacred reality, and as such is entitled to the opportunity of fulfilling those great human potentials with which God has endowed man.”

For many Americans, their faith calls upon them to defend those persons, each one of which is a sacred reality that must be permitted to achieve the great human potential that is God’s hope for all of us.

This is what Ronald Reagan believed. The current president’s “healthcare” mandate is a flagrant rejection of these principles.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” and his latest release, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.”

© 2012 by The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The views & opinions expressed herein may, but do not necessarily, reflect the views of Grove City College.

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Oh-Bummer for Obamacare
By Chuck Norris

OBAMA = One Big Ass Mistake America

AmmoLand Gun News

Dallas, TX - -(Ammoland.com)- President Barack Obama’s pride-and-joy health care reform law (aka the Affordable Care Act of 2010) suffered a super setback last Friday, when an appeals court ruled that it is unconstitutional to penalize Americans who do not purchase medical insurance.

Reuters reported, “The U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, ruled 2 to 1 that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but it unanimously reversed a lower court decision that threw out the entire law.”

Do you hear angels singing, too?
Of course, it ain’t over until the Supreme Court sings a similar judgment. It is upon the high court’s voice that the legality of the individual mandate ultimately hinges, and the court will decide whether it will be placed upon the already burdened backs of Americans in 2014. And the Supreme Court’s ruling could be handed down a few months before the November 2012 presidential election.

The White House wasted no time in denouncing Friday’s federal court ruling: “We strongly disagree with this decision and we are confident it will not stand.”

The White House loves to cite how a few other courts have upheld Obama’s health care law. But last week’s ruling was the first time a Democratic-appointed judge ruled against a critical aspect of Obamacare.

The president knows everything rides on the perpetuity of Obamacare’s individual mandate. Without it, the entire law collapses. So Obama adviser Stephanie Cutter reiterated in the White House response the administration’s same weak defense and rhetoric in hopes of sparing what the president calls the “individual responsibility provision.”

First, she wrote, “The Congressional Budget Office estimated that only 1 percent of all Americans would pay a penalty for not having health insurance in 2016.”

But how can the government-instituted CBO project the number of Americans who in some way will renege on Obamacare in 2016? If citizens can’t afford to buy medical insurance in 2016, what makes the feds think they can afford to pay a penalty for not having it? What are the feds going to do then, throw the economically downtrodden in jail? Who is going to pay for the incarceration of 1 percent of society, or roughly 3.5 million potential new inmates?

Though the CBO says only 1 percent will pay penalties, you can bet that 100 percent will pay for this mammoth health care reform law one way or another via taxes and trickledown costs for employer mandates, Medicaid expansions, tax credits for uninsured, funding grants for states, additional government personnel, etc.

In June, the nonprofit Employment Policies Institute released new research from economists at Cornell University and Indiana University that not only exposes the bias of the CBO but also posits that Obamacare has been grossly underestimated and will result in “much higher costs for taxpayers” than the CBO has estimated.

Friday’s White House blog rebutting the appellate court’s decision also alleged: “Without the individual responsibility provision, people could wait until they’re sick or injured to apply for coverage since insurance companies could no longer say no or charge more.

That would lead to double digit premiums increases — up to 20 percent — for everyone in the individual insurance market.”

Wrong again.
Just this past week, Forbes reported on the annual projections from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Forbes’ article is titled “Medicare Actuary: Obamacare Will Triple the Growth Rate of Net Insurance Costs.”

It says that in 2014, “the actuaries find that growth in the net cost of health insurance will increase by nearly 14 percent, compared to 3.5 percent if (Obamacare) had never passed. The growth rate of private insurance costs will rise to 9.4 percent, from 5.0 percent under prior law: an 88 percent increase.”

Why is it that anytime the feds talk dollars and financial projections, they are in diametric opposition to the experts?

I don’t care how the Obama administration bends the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution; Obamacare is unconstitutional and going to run U.S. commerce further into the ground. Any junior certified public accountant knows the last thing our flailing government and economy need is another entitlement! (There’s a reason the majority of the states in our union — 26, to be exact — have defied Obamacare’s legality and are fighting its enforcement right now.)

One conclusion the White House did get right in its rebuttal to the appellate court’s ruling is this: “Today’s ruling is one of many decisions on the Affordable Care Act that we will see in the weeks and months ahead.”

The feds’ constant botching of facts, figures and our future leaves me thinking that too many kids are running our country. And just for them, I’m wrapping up this column with a poem that a friend sent me from the Internet. I don’t know the exact source, but I know I’d like its author. It is titled “Dr. Seuss 2011″:

• I do not like this Uncle Sam, I do not like his health care scam.
• I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books.
• I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like White House backdoor deals.
• I do not like when they kick the financial can, I do not like this ‘YES, WE CAN!’
• I do not like their spending sprees. Why can’t they get it — nothing’s free.
• I do not like their smug replies, broken promises and corruption ties.
• I do not like this kind of hope. I do not like it — Nope nope nope!

Chuck Norris

COPYRIGHT 2011 CHUCK NORRIS

About Chuck Norris:Action hero and Second Amendment activist, Chuck Norris is one of the most enduringly popular actors in the world. He has starred in more than 20 major motion pictures. His television series “Walker, Texas Ranger,” which completed its run in April 2001 after eight full seasons, is the most successful Saturday night series on CBS since “Gunsmoke.”In 2006, he added the title of columnist to his illustrious list of credits with the launch of his popular Internet column. Now Chuck is a regular contributor to AmmoLand, click the following link to See more of Chuck Norris on AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.

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