Why are you, and our other representatives, not listening to your constituents? The arrogance being demonstrated by those who are forging ahead with this singularly vile piece of legislation is mind-boggling. The methods used to force its passage are corrupt. Our elected officials, who are supposed to represent the people, have demonstrated and expressed contempt for not only their constituents, who elected them - but also for the constitution, the purpose of which is to limit the size and scope of government.

There are many moral reasons to object to this attempt to take over individuals’ health care by a massive government intrusion; forced federal funding for abortion; lack of protection for health care workers’ consciences; and no specific protection for human life from conception to natural death. In addition, this proposed takeover violates the traditional American values of self-determination and individual personal responsibility. How can our elected representatives not embrace and do all they can to protect these values? 

As I have noted in the many previous letters I have sent you about this matter, your constituents know that the real purpose of this “health care reform” legislation is to set up the government takeover of our own health care system - which, with all its flaws, is the best in the world.

The proposed takeover is being done with the blithe assurance that it is a cost containment issue, for which dishonest numbers are provided for the CBO calculation. The problem with this assurance is that your constituents know that "cost containment" and "government" are contradictory terms. There is not one government agency that costs us less over time. To the contrary, we know from our own experience that the government can never do anything as humanely, creatively, efficiently or as responsively as the private sector. (See: the US Post Office vs. UPS/FedEx et al.) We also know that government agencies cut costs by cutting services to the public. That is the history of government agencies.

In addition, we see the example of other countries’ socialized medicine plans – and not one has contained costs, even with the reduction in patient services and innovation that was the inevitable result of their plans.

The current issues with our own health insurance plans are a direct result of previous governmental intervention – at the state and federal levels. How is more of the same kind (and a much greater degree) of governmental intervention going to fix the very problems it caused in the first place?

There is nothing significant in the proposed legislation that addresses the spiraling costs of self-defensive medicine being practiced by doctors and hospitals in response to an overactive and imaginative tort litigation bar.

As a descendant of those who undertook a dangerous journey in a small, leaking vessel across thousands of miles and set up a settlement (Plymouth Colony) where the values the government is proposing were tried (on a much smaller basis) and failed miserably, I ask you, and my other representatives, to please read and reflect on that history. Our ancestors learned quickly that enforced communitarian values did not work. Human nature has not changed.

For all these reasons and the many others that have been enumerated during this national health care debate, I ask you to vote “no” on any of the current health care plans. Reform is needed, but not this reform, and definitely not this way.