"Healing is painful, but you have to work through it." Pay attention, House Republicans, excise the cancer first so the real healing can begin--pain and all

House healthcare bill isn't even remission of Obamacare cancer

About the term remission - it is an admission that the treatment used to diminish advancing cancer was inadequate and it is expected to recur. In healthcare lingo it infers that the cancer is not curable. (We won’t go into how the term cure isn’t applied to life-threatening diseases as it touches on how healthcare has taken on a litigious nature over decades, although that’s much the reason why government stepped into the healthcare mire in the first place.) In this instance, it is Obamacare (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) that’s an incurable cancer, and yet, the House leadership is trying to sell this so-called American Health Care Act as a cure. It isn’t even remission.

The reason precedes the very title: “Budget Reconciliation Legislative Recommendations Relating to Repeal and Replace of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” (emphasis mine). The House committee started from the wrong premise by going directly to reconciliation rather than simple repeal, thinking they could pull the wool over citizens’ eyes by amending (Sec. 101 (a), right at the top of the bill) the 2000 page, plus 20,000 pages of regulations, legislative failure. The Freedom caucus and conservatives in Congress have been bellowing the truth which Speaker Paul Ryan and his seat-protecting buddies have ignored—the PPACA must be repealed, removed and scrubbed from the earth before reform can be attempted. Oh, Ryan has it down how things must proceed in order to pass budget reconciliation legislation, but that is going about the process backwards. Even as he and new HHS Secretary Tom Price tell us that this amounts to a three-stage process, they have already sunk the reform by tying it to a cancer that hasn’t been eradicated. To do this repeal right, the previous legislation must be utterly eliminated first. As mainstream healthcare views it, you have to kill the cancer before you can rebuild the body, and, in this instance, there is no avoiding the painful rebuilding process. Unless, of course, you make a weak attempt to cover-up the disease with a few panaceas that make it look like the disease is dead when the sick culture is still very much alive, just laying low.

We can look to Scripture for exactly how healing a culture can’t occur unless the cancer is excised from its root. Every time a king of Judah (the books of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles) attempted to revitalize God’s Law and institute healing of the People by renewing worship at the Temple, it wouldn’t work unless the false idols and altars were removed from the land and destroyed. Anything less was a band-aid over the boil that continued to fester, undermining any attempt at complete healing. This is what the House has offered up, a band-aid that has too many holdovers from the original Obamacare and subsequent regulations in order to mollify the idol worshippers who will throw a tantrum if their altars and Asherah poles are removed. But what about the majority of constituents who have been shafted by the expansion of Medicaid to the point that their insurance is unaffordable and no longer qualifies as insurance? They are thrown aside in order to subsidize low income and illegals—yes, this bill doesn’t even remove coverage for illegal immigrants and aliens. The problem is the way the House is going about the repeal—it isn’t one. And the reason is, to appease those who have been given an unearned entitlement. Sorry, but the only way to get rid of this disease called Obamacare is to purge it completely out of the system. Then, and only then, can free market principles be reintroduced, which competition in the market place (after removing the hand-tying regulations) will fill in ways to create affordable assistance to the truly needy without breaking the bank. Charity is meant to come from the Church and the private sector after all, not the government. A wise doctor once shared this piece of wisdom that sped up the healing process after an injury—“Healing is painful, but you have to work through it.” Pay attention, House Republicans, excise the cancer first so the real healing can begin—pain and all. Note: The foregoing is according to the 123 page bill that was released earlier this week.

A. Dru Kristenev -- Bio and Archives Former newspaper publisher, A. Dru Kristenev, grew up in the publishing industry working every angle of a paper, from ad composition and sales, to personnel management, copy writing, and overseeing all editorial content. During her tenure as a news professional, Kristenev traveled internationally as a representative of the paper and, on separate occasions, non-profit organizations. Since 2007, Kristenev has authored five fact-filled political suspense novels, the Baron Series, and two non-fiction books, all available on Amazon. Carrying an M.S. degree and having taught at premier northwest universities, she is the trustee of Scribes’ College of Journalism, which mission is to train a new generation of journalists in biblical standards of reporting. More information about the college and how to support it can be obtained by contacting Kristenev at [email protected].

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