There is nothing like a personal example to drive a point home. My grandson, Gavin, has a cold so Annie, my daughter and the ME of BHM, made a doctor’s appointment for him today. Gavin is covered by Tricare, the Medicare-like insurance our Government gives military families. The local doctor has agreed to accept Tricare.

But this morning we got a call from the doctor’s office informing us that Tricare still had not transferred the necessary paperwork so Annie could be seen by a local doctor. Annie has been in Oregon with us since September while her husband is serving in Iraq defending the country. She has been trying to get Tricare bureaucrats to transfer the necessary paperwork for that long. This is how this Medicare-like insurance works — or in this case, does not work. It is a good example of how socialized health care will work once Obama gets it passed into law.

Even when Annie is on station at a military base, she says it would typically take at least four weeks to get an appointment with a military doctor. This is not surprising to any of us vets who have had to deal with military medicine either while we were on active duty or after we were released to civilian life. Shortly after I was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1969, a VA hospital nearly killed me when they botched a simple appendix operation.

This is the face of Universal Health Care, Socialized Medicine, or whatever the Obama Government chooses to call the National Health Care he hopes to put in place for all of us. For all you people who are hoping Obama will deliver on his promise of Universal Health Care, this is how it will work.

I think I’ll just transfer Annie to BHM’s private policy so her baby can see a doctor.

Ron Paul gave this talk a few days ago. I agree with it completely.

I took the following Obama quote off foxnews.com:
“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.

If this is the tone Obama intends to use to get Republicans to cooperate with him, he’s going to fail. It sound pretty belligerent to me. I suspect Obama intends merely to shove his new bailout legislation down Republicans’ throats.

This may be good, when you think about it. The faster he tries to take us down the road to socialism, the better the chance that Americans will rebel against it. Both Democrats and Republicans have been very successful for the last several decades using the “slow” approach in remaking America into a Big Government-dominated society. Maybe a guy in a big hurry like Obama is just what we need to promote a reaction from that section of the population that still values freedom.

Notice how concerned Obama is of Limbaugh. I predicted in last issue’s editorial that he would go after talk radio with the Fairness Doctrine. This may be his opening salvo.

The “grace period” I talked about last post may be short-lived if this is an indication of the strong arm tactics Obama intends to use.

I have mixed feelings about Barack Obama’s inauguration.

I don’t like the “progressive” (the liberal’s new name for liberal) takeover of political power in the U.S. It bodes ill for the Constitutional rights I think are important, especially gun rights and the individual’s right to be free of Big Government intrusion into our personal lives.

But I like the polls that indicate that most African-Americans now feel that their struggle for their rights is finally over. I’ve always felt they had all the opportunities of other Americans, but I know many of them did not. If this convinces them that they do, then I think the inauguration is, indeed, a great day for America.

I just hope Obama’s message of change doesn’t mean the end of gun rights, the end of talk radio, and the beginning of a socialist state in America. His deification by the left wing media bothers me greatly. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all deified by their nations’ media just before I came into this world, and a study of history tells me we don’t need another deity at the helm of the last superpower left on earth.

But I’ll give Obama a grace period. I hope he does not trample my rights. I hope he understands that America is the land of the free, not the land of Big Government determining which freedoms should be supported and which should be outlawed.