Dr. Carson’s Remedy for Obamacare
“I think particularly about ancient Rome. Very powerful. Nobody could even challenge them militarily, but what happened to them? They destroyed themselves from within. Moral decay, fiscal irresponsibility. They destroyed themselves. If you don’t think that can happen to America, you get out your books and you start reading, but you know, we can fix it.”
– Dr. Ben Carson
On Feb. 8, 2013, Dr. Ben Carson, the famous neurosurgeon and head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, gave a speech for the ages on the storied history of America and how Obamacare fails short of that history and our sacred ideals. He began his speech by retelling the birth of America against all rational hope of defeating the great British Empire, then the superpower of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the Revolutionary War (1775-82), and again in the War of 1812. In the latter war, General Armistead protected Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, where piles of bodies lay at the foot of that famous flag he commissioned, and where heroic soldiers rebuffed any and all threats from our English combatants who would cause our flag to fall to the ground, giving rise to poetic inspiration by Francis Scott Key who personally witnessed that battle and wrote these immortal lines of the Star Spangled Banner:
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there…
Next, Dr. Carson presented a stirring account of how he arose from being a lazy, uninspired student shackled in crushing poverty in the ghettos of Detroit in the 1950s to become one of the most renowned surgeons in the world. I’ve read Dr. Carson’s autobiography Gifted Hands, and since age 12 my father, Professor Ellis Washington, following Mrs. Carson’s parenting techniques, made me read all of the literary classics called “The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics” by Dr. W. John Campbell and to write my own detailed, summary analysis of each book. As of two years ago, I have written 100 essays on every one of these classics, about 30-35 as expanded, singular essays which I plan compile and publish as a future book.
Next, Dr. Carson gave an exciting recounting of the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville and his eyewitness account beginning in 1831 when he came to study America firsthand, writing his famous two-volume book, “Democracy in America.” The Europeans were fascinated at this phenomenon. They marveled: How could a fledgling nation, barely 50 years old, already be competing with them on virtually all levels?
Next, Dr. Carson moved to our unjust, progressive tax code, which penalizes the earners over the takers. Carson said, “What about our taxation system? So complex there is no one who can possibly comply with every jot and tittle of our tax system. If I wanted to get you, I could get you on a tax issue. That doesn’t make any sense. What we need to do is come up with something that is simple.”
According to Dr. Carson, the government creates numerous loopholes and complexities in our tax code to placate lobbyists and special interest groups. This “progressive” tax code is grossly unfair, pitting U.S citizens against each other, with the top 1 percent of taxpayers paying almost 40 percent of federal income taxes, and the top 5 percent of taxpayers paying almost 60 percent of federal income taxes. 50 percent of taxpayers pay no federal income tax. This is TREASON! Our tax system must be reformed and simplified, removing all class warfare penalties and socialist policies. In place of this bloated beast, a flat tax or consumption tax should be instituted across the board at the same rate for all. Carson continues:
- When I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the Universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe. Now we don’t necessarily have to do it 10%, but it’s the principle. He didn’t say, if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithes. He didn’t say, if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithes. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion dollars you put in a billion. You make $10, you put in $1 – of course, you gotta get rid of the loopholes, but now some people say, that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion dollars as much as the guy who made $10. Where does it say you have to hurt the guy. He’s just put in a billion in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him.
When Dr. Carson says, “We don’t need to hurt him” – contrary to the view of so many that we must hurt someone just because they make more money than others – he’s underscoring the jealousy rooted in class warfare, envy, and laziness that will only result in economic feudalism, Marxism, socialism, and societal chaos America is trapped in today. By paying a proportional and equal tithe (=10 %) of one’s annual income, America can balance out any economic failures and have a tax system in America based on market capitalism, morality, and biblical principles.
Dr. Carson continues his speech by proclaiming,
- It’s that kind of thinking – it’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here, building our infrastructure and creating jobs – and we’re smart enough – we’re smart enough to figure out how to do that. We’ve already started down the path to solving one of the other big problems, healthcare. We need to have good healthcare for everybody. It’s the most important thing that a person can have. Money means nothing, titles mean nothing, when you don’t have your health, but we’ve got to figure out efficient ways to do it. We spend a lot of money on healthcare, twice as much per capita as anybody in else in the world, and yet not very efficient. What can we do?
Dr. Carson stresses the extreme importance of healthcare; everyone needs it. Our dependence on healthcare outweighs most of America’s other issues. We need a proper healthcare plan, especially when Obamacare is currently ravaging America’s healthcare. Dr. Carson delivers his solution to this healthcare mess:
- Here’s my solution. When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings account [HSA], to which money can be contributed, pre-tax from the time you are born, to the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family members so that when you’re 85 years old and you’ve got 6 diseases, you’re not trying to spend up everything. You’re happy to pass it on and nobody is talking about death panels. That’s number one. Also –
- For the people who are indigent, who don’t have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already have this huge pot of money instead of sending it to bureaucracy – let’s put it into HSAs. Now they have some control over their own healthcare, and what do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to learn very quickly how to be responsible. When Mr. Jones gets that diabetic foot ulcer, he’s not going to the Emergency Room and blowing a big chunk of it. He’s going to go to the Clinic. He learns that very quickly – gets the same treatment. In the Emergency Room, they send him out. In the Clinic they say, now let’s get your diabetes under control so that you’re not back here in three weeks with another problem. That’s how we begin to solve these kinds of problems. It’s much more complex than that, and I don’t have time to go into it all, but we can do all these things because we are smart people.
In his conclusion, Dr. Carson has an answer for the poor who cannot pay for health treatment. We can make donations to their Healthcare Saving Account (HSA), thus avoiding the economic suicide of sending all of our of money to a faceless, incompetent bureaucracy, hoping that the money will be there when we “retire.” Also, Dr. Carson’s expresses disdain for emergency rooms in some hospitals that inadequately address patient’s needs. He explains how the clinic will properly treat patients’ inflictions and make sure they will not come back with any more problems than before.
Fidelity to the constitution, fiscal discipline, and individual responsibility are how America will solve our current healthcare issues through the private treatment of patients by clinics and the free market capitalist system of donating to others via religious charity, as we did before the rise of FDR’s “New Deal” welfare-state programs of the 1930s and 40s, and LBJ’s “Great Society” anti-family programs of the 1960s. Finally, HSA will restore to people the dignity of taking care of themselves, cutting government waste, fraud, and abuse, especially the horrible corruption of Obamacare, which nobody understands but everybody realizes will quickly kill off infants and cast aside the elderly and the sick who fall prey to the many socialist tentacles of Obamacare.
Stone Washington is a sophomore at Grosse Pointe South High School, in Grosse Pointe Farms, MI.
Category: Commentary, Socrates Corner
Stone, Bravo once again. Mom and Dad have done an excellent job in raising you.