Tea Partiers Need to Get Their Facts Straight

This is from an article in the Washington Post today about a man who went out to protest the recently passed healthcare bill:

"[Randy] Millam sat at his kitchen table in Lowden, Iowa, with 14 Sharpie markers and a piece of foam board, working to condense a year of frustration into a 3-by-3-foot catchphrase. 'Chains We Can Believe In,' he wrote, drawing the communist hammer and sickle on the poster's top left corner. Then he grabbed an American flag, inserted batteries into a megaphone bought on the cheap for $25 and guzzled a 24-hour energy drink. Just as Obama took off in Air Force One for Iowa City, Millam loaded into his muddy Ford Fusion and drove 50 miles across the cornfields of eastern Iowa.

'The president just about declared war against the American people last weekend,' he said."

Yes, this man said an American president declared war against his own people after passing reform that he, President Obama, ran on while being elected by a strong majority in 2008.

With his megaphone, Millam planned, and did, yell his protests at the president.

"'I'm not ready for outright violence yet. We have to be civil for as long as we can,'" Millam continued. Not ready yet? Yet? So that means he'll take to violence at some point if he does not get what he wants?

He argues that "'The president controls the crowd, controls the message, controls the people of this country. That is not freedom! That is not democracy! That is not the America I grew up in!'"

Well, actually, the message I've heard for the past year during the healthcare debate has been quite mixed. Never has the President's voice been the loudest on healthcare reform, it has been "Tea Baggers" (which I find so fun to say) and Republicans who have distorted what this healthcare bill does.

So, in other words, the voices that have been loudest haven't been the ones with the facts, which is a repression of freedom of thought, because people don't know what the healthcare bill really entitles people to.

The false information that Millam is hurling at the president, the man who knows this healthcare bill better than almost anyone, would never change his mind.

It's true, people against this bill have been outspoken (like Millam), however, they have also been mislead; they haven't received real, hard. While they believe that this bill will allow the government to "takeover" the healthcare industry, they will likely see no difference in their coverage and only very few will see a rise in taxes, only those who are the best-off.

In the UK and Canada (and every other developed country) there is universal healthcare, but nobody screams socialism and communism. In fact, in Canada, the conservative party has been in power for a very long time and in the likely May elections in the UK, the Conservative Party is suppose to win back parliament. No one in Conservative parties in the UK or Canada are calling to revoke their healthcare systems, they like what they have and what it does for their citizens.

I can promise that when this bill goes into full effect in 2014, it will only take a few years for people to act like this bill is part of what being an American is about.

What I am saying is that when Medicare passed, Republicans were dead set against it, calling it "Socialism" (sound familiar?), but now no one could ever think of taking it away, Republicans especially.

That is exactly what will become of this healthcare bill, in a few years, no one will ever think to get rid of it.