Healthcare Truths

If you're reading this on facebook please go here: http://lrknapp99.blogspot.com/2009/08/if-youre-reading-this-on-facebook.html to read it on my blog so all the links are available. Thanks!

August 26, 2009

Dear Friend of Liberty,

Make no mistake: there's a strong, unrelenting push to destroy what remains of private health care in this country.

And now congressional leaders are attempting to overcome their scheme's plunging approval numbers by manipulating Ted Kennedy's death to create support for a “legacy” health care bill.

Our representatives and senators are eager to get back to Washington and away from the tremendous grassroots opposition to health control.

Which means it's time for us to turn up the heat.

Click here to get contact information to write, call, and fax Congress to express your outrage at their plans to finish taking over what remains of private health care. And be sure to sign our "Stop the Government Health Care Scheme" petition.

Health control propagandists claim that we are defending the status quo of a "failed" private sector by opposing their latest scheme.

However, their bill cements the status quo in health care: continuing (and expanding) government intrusion.

Protectionist regulations have decimated competition in health insurance at the local level, and the vast, complex tax code has subsidized employer-provided high cost health care. The FDA, in the name of consumer protection, has restricted the supply of drugs from home and abroad. And individuals are barred from shopping across state lines for health insurance.

Watch this YouTube video to see a ER physician describe how the government obstructs the supply of health services.

Does any of that really sound like the free market at work to you?

Government-manipulated health care is bankrupting this country. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are drowning in tens of trillions of dollars worth of unfunded liabilities and red ink, yet the response from Congress is to propose more 1,000+ page bills that will move our health care system perilously close to other nations' statist care.

You know as well as I that this unfair plan is doomed to be a fiscal nightmare comparable to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that Congress-created HMOs are notorious for denying care to control spiraling costs.

Our nation has seen enough big government schemes, especially in medicine. President Obama is right about one thing: it's time to take action.

It's time to let the free market work.

Click here for contact information for the House and Senate in order to demand real reform. In addition to contacting your representative and senators, be sure to campaign hard for health freedom at your local townhall meeting.

Urge your representative to fight to allow individuals to shop across state lines for insurance, curb the authority of the FDA to prevent Americans from going outside the country for cheaper medications, and enable individuals to purchase their own health insurance without being taxed for doing so.

Tell Congress to give Americans control over their health care by giving them control over their health care dollar via tax credits and deductions similar to those outlined in Congressman Ron Paul's Comprehensive Health Care Reform Act (HR 1495).

Ask your congressman to protect privacy rights by allowing patients and physicians to opt-out of any government-mandated or funded system of electronic health care records, and to repeal the federal law creating an "unique patient identifier" by adopting the policies contained in Congressman Ron Paul's Protect Patients and Physicians Privacy Act (HR 2630).

In the meantime, we can push for reform of our respective state's competition-destroying mandates on private insurers. These simple, common-sense reforms would immediately alleviate the costs of health care without adding to the exploding national debt.

And if you are able, please donate to Campaign for Liberty today so that we can educate Americans on a true free market health care system and defeat this latest health control scheme.

Don't let the proponents of Obamacare sell you on the notion that we need the government to save us from the mess that government made. Click here to demand that Congress support legitimate health care reform!

In Liberty,

John Tate

President

P.S. Campaign for Liberty is committed to fighting this health control scheme and Congress' other attempts to further shred our Constitution, but we can't do it without your continued support. Please contribute to Campaign for Liberty today to ensure we can not only defeat big government's plans for our lives, but also champion the principles of freedom, peace, and prosperity.

Jesus is All the World To Me.

Is he? Is he really? I was reading the "Kaeb Family" blog this morning and she had posted this story. It really touched my heart. What a great challenge as we start this week!


“The state-run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place. It is large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless and lonely people who are waiting to die. On the brightest of days it seems dark inside, and it smells of sickness and stale urine. I went there once or twice a week for four years, but I never wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief. It is not the kind of place one gets used to.

“On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.

“As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisors would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight they could stand anything in the building. I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been here, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years. This was Mabel.

“I don’t know why I spoke to her—she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, ‘Here is a flower for you Happy Mother’s Day.’ She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, ‘Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.’

“I said, ‘Of course,’ and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, ‘Here, this is from Jesus.’

“That was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. Later I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history. She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to the convalescent hospital. For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches, and stomach aches, and then the cancer came too. Her three roommates were all human vegetables who screamed occasionally but never talked. They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was understaffed, especially on Sundays when I usually visited, the stench was often overpowering.

Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed. Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word. On other days I would take a book of hymns and sing with her, and she would know all the words of the old songs. For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory. She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns.

“It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder, and I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say. . . .

“During one hectic week of final exams I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me, ‘What does Mabel have to think about—hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night?’ So I went to her and asked, ‘Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?’

“And she said, ‘I think about my Jesus.’

“I sat there, and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, ‘What do you think about Jesus?’ She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote . . .:

I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. . . . Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think. Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.

And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:
Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go,
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad He makes me glad.
He’s my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know. I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening—and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it? “The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there in that bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power.

Here was an ordinary human being who received supernatural power to do extraordinary things. Her entire life consisted of following Jesus as best she could in her situation: patient endurance of suffering, solitude, prayer, meditation on Scripture, worship, fellowship when it was possible, giving when she had a flower or a piece of candy to offer. Imagine being in her condition and saying, “I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied.” This is the Twenty-third Psalm come to life: “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Audit the Federal Reserve

Please take a few minutes to look through the following website. It lays out the case for giving the Congress the authority to audit the Federal Reserve. Right now, there are trillions of dollars of our tax-payer money that we don't know where it went or how it was spent because the Fed is an independent entity from our elected government. That independence is, in some respects, a good thing. It keeps monetary policy from being controlled by politics (somewhat). However, when the Fed refuses to give a full account of what they're doing and how they're distributing our money, it's time to look a little deeper. Not mention I think their monetary policy has been disastrously horrible the last several decades.

http://www.auditthefed.com/

by the breath of His mouth

Psalms 33:6
By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.



We serve an awesome mighty God. Ponder on the fact that all that was discussed in that video was made by the breath of our all mighty God!

I stand humbled and amazed.

p.s. For those of you reading this in facebook, I put a link to the video in the comments.

The church

Before I get into this post, I want to point you to the Schroeder's blog here: http://jkschroeder.blogspot.com/ They also have a caring bridge site here: http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jordanschroeder
They're great ways to stay updated on current prayer needs.


I recently received a thought-provoking email from a friend. What could we do we do well as a denomination? What could we improve on? Do you agree with the author?I thought I would share some of these thoughts by Kim Riddlebarger. I think he hits on some great points that get us thinking about the church, its purpose, and what is really important. This is not an entire article, but rather a few excerpts.

--

"Like water running downhill, [lowest common denominator churches] have taken the line of least resistance. They settle for the lowest point so as to be most attractive to all. Sadly, all these same churches now look alike and sound alike. They are no longer divided by doctrine or their histories. The only real difference among them is in the programs they offer....The focus of the church of the lowest common denominator is me. The sermon is about problems I face. The music is music I like. The church service is designed to entertain me. That explains why they all look and sound so much alike. Somehow, God got lost in all the talk about my felt needs. The theology of the church of the lowest common denominator is utterly man-centered. It is all about me—or at least that's how I am made to feel....

The solution is to take the focus off me, and put it back where it belongs, on God. Instead of the church of the lowest common denominator, a...church should be the church of the highest common denominator. But what does a church of the highest common denominator look like? It looks like this—it is a church where the theology, worship and evangelism is God-centered, not man-centered.

In a God-centered church of the highest common denominator, God is the evangelist, not the minister, and where every member is an ambassador of Christ. Instead of adopting an unbiblical “seeker” philosophy, in which the church “dumbs-down” its worship service, supposedly, to reach non-Christians...Christians are to take very seriously what the Bible says about “seekers.” They don't exist! According to Paul “there is no one who seeks God” (Romans 3:11). Rather, our confidence is in the God who seeks sinners!

How does God seek sinners? He seeks them through his preached word (Romans 10:14)! Therefore, a growing...church is a word-centered church. A church of the highest common denominator is a church where the word of God is preached....It is a place where the promises that God makes in his word are trusted and diligently sought....the minister is not an entertainer but a preacher....not a motivator, but a man of prayer. He is not a manager, but a student of God's word. The members of such a church likewise attend to the word. They read it, they learn it, and they teach it to their children.

[It] is a church where the law is preached in all its terror, the gospel in all its sweetness, and where the Christian life is centered in gratitude for all that God has done for us in Christ. The sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper will be prominent, since these are holy signs and seals for us to see, and which confirm in our hearts the faith produced by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the word. These are the “techniques” God uses to move sinners to repentance and to confirm the saints in the joy and comfort of their salvation. Programs are fine as they serve and support the preached word and sacraments. But they can never replace them. Why? Programs are about me. Word and sacrament are about God."

Prayer for the Schroeders

This is a call to prayer. Below is a picture of Jordan & Katelyn Schroeder and their two little girls. The email is from Jordan's sister and explains the need for prayer. Katelyn had the following verse posted to her facebook account this morning:Romans 15:13 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.Will you join me in praying that verse into their life today?


















From: Lindsey Getz
Subject: Jordan
To:
Date: Thursday, August 6, 2009, 4:19 PM

Jordan & Katelyn ended up meeting with the doctor today. She told them Jordan has Stage 4 cancer because the cancer is not just in his pelvis but has moved to his lungs (as shown on the PET scan). Chemotherapy is still a treatment option, but the doctor thinks his cancer is incurable (and gives him two years to live). They meet again with the doctors tomorrow to go over all of the results, determine next steps, etc.

Our God is a big God...so keep praying for a miracle of healing. Please keep our family in your prayers...especially Jordan & Katelyn and their two girls (Jaycee & Arawen) as they face the difficulties ahead.

Linds