Armey: “The public at large is dealing with the hostile takeover of the ‘heartfelt sector’ of the economy –– my personal healthcare. They [the government] want to take it over and they want to run it, and that is scary to the public at large.” (Getty Images)
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey is organizing a march on Washington against the Obama administration’s healthcare plan that he hopes will finally finish off the Democratic push for socialized medicine.
The march, organized by Armey’s political group FreedomWorks, is scheduled for Sept. 12 and is already generating hundreds of thousands of responses, the Texas Republican tells Newsmax.TV. The group isn’t providing transportation, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
See Video: Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey talks about the movement to defeat Obamacare - Click Here Now
“We had a guy the other day from Indiana that said, ‘I want to get there.’ When we explained that we don’t bus people into these things, he said, ‘No, a bunch of us are getting together and renting our own bus. We’re all coming,’” Armey told Newsmax.TV’s Ashley Martella.
“The fact is they want their voices to be heard and they are looking at a venue in which they can express it.”
Armey also told Newsmax that:
“The public at large is dealing with the same mass of hostile takeover of the ‘heartfelt sector’ of the economy –– my personal healthcare, Armey said. “They [the government] want to take it over and they want to run it, and that is scary to the public at large.”
Armey, one of the architects of the “Republican Revolution” and “The Contract with America,” which put the GOP in control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, tells Newsmax that FreedomWorks has been an active player in the resistance to the Democrats healthcare overhaul.
“We are very active,” Armey says. “We put up our own Web site that encourages people by way of letting them know where the town halls will be. Sometimes members of Congress aren’t very effective at communicating to the public at large that they are having a Town Hall meeting. They communicate to all their best personal friends, advisers and supporters that they are going to get together, and then they bill it as a Town Hall meeting when it is too late for others to get in.”
Armey, a former U.S. Representative from Texas's 26th congressional district (1985–2003), points to an incident in Florida where “by the time the public at large got there, the room was already filled up full of mostly labor people.”
Armey says FreedomWorks lets constituents know where Town Halls will be held and encourages them how to approach a member of Congress, how to conduct themselves, and to turn out.
Armey says that HillaryCare, in which voters revolted against Hillary Clinton’s attempt at healthcare reform in 1993-94, was in large part responsible for the Republican Revolution that swept the GOP into control of Congress.
“I think it’s pretty much the same thing,” Armey explains. I remember George Miller, who is now one of the leaders in Nancy Pelosi’s cabinet, growling at me in 1994 that the public is going to get [healthcare reform] whether they want it or not! That’s an underestimation of the will of the public that [the Democrats] continue to make, so, again, what they have is a new plan to take over the healthcare sector of the economy, and the public is reacting just as they did in 1994.”
Armey says Miller’s arrogance in that statement is absolutely one of the most stunning moments he ever had.
“The fact that a member of Congress would say the American people are going to get it whether they want it or not because we’ve been waiting 40 years to do this, I just sat there and looked at him and said, ‘Now wait a minute. Is this about us or is it about the nation and the nation’s people? Are we here to take care of what we’ve wanted for the last 40 years, or are we hear to take care of our constituents?’”
Armey calls the push for healthcare reform a harsh reflection of the arrogance of Congress –– what you might call “the audacity of conceit” among members of Congress. He predicts a grassroots backlash against Obama’s hostile government takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
“It’s already there,” Armey tells Newsmax. “These people are showing up at the Town Hall meetings. If you go to the FreedomWorks Web site you’ll see we are organizing a march on Washington on Sept. 12, and we are amazed at the number of people that want to sign up.”
The people have no choice but to raise their voice, Armey said, because Congress in recent years has been “stampeded” into making bad policy.
“Congress in recent years has shown itself to be perfectly capable of being stampeded like a bunch of lemmings off a cliff into making the wrong policy decisions because of their fear of being seen as the guy that did nothing,” Armey says. “That’s how we got things like TARP, the auto bailout and these massive takeovers and spending programs.”
Armey says that in September or October, in their frustration, the Obama administration ––along with its “auxiliary organizations in the press” –– will “create the illusion that we’ve got a flying flu outbreak that is greater and more dangerous than the bubonic plague, and they’ll stampede these guys into the votes.”
Armey finds Rahm Emmanuel’s “never let a good crisis go to waste” remark a joke.
“That cracked me up. One of the things about liberals that amuses me is those kind of moments where they slip and tell the truth. Every now and then when they do that, they give you a moment to remember, and Rahm Emmanuel gave us one there. I’m sure he was severely scolded by all his associates and colleagues, and reminded, ‘Rahm, in our philosophical framework, we don’t tell truths. That’s against the law.’”
Armey believes that given the agenda of Obama and the liberal leadership of Congress, Republicans stand a good chance at taking back control of the House and at diminishing their disadvantage in the Senate in 2010.
“I think there’s a very big chance,” he says. “All the electoral cards are stacked against [the Democrats] in 2010. It’s a crucial year for liberty in my estimation because, as you know, in the year 2010 when they conduct the census, you’re going to have the most crooked census in the history of the nation.
“I’m laughing at these guys. They are going to say, ‘We’re going to use a method called sampling, and they way that works is we put all the congressional district maps on a table and we take a look at the different maps and how we’d like them to be and who we’d like to be in the different districts. Then we’ll decide what the populations will be. And they send ACORN out to do the canvassing.
“I don’t know what this ACORN outfit is, but I’ve got to tell you, they [have their hands] in everything that comes through Congress these days, and there’s money for ACORN in it. There’s money for ACORN in this healthcare bill. I don’t get it. Saul Alinsky must be a genius –– he made doctors out of all these social activists.”
See Video: Fomer House Majority Leader Dick Armey talks about the movement to defeat Obamacare - Click Here Now
By: Rick Pedraza
‘The Goal’ needs to be:
- *Dump all 5 of the present bills being looked at in Congress (Both Houses)
- No Public Option of any kind and that includes the new Co-Op Idea Co-Op = Public Option = Single Payer (whether immediately or in a 2 or 3 step process)
- No Rationing
- Fix the system we have now…
- Invoke serious tort reform… stopping frivolous lawsuits and restricting the awards
- Clean up Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Veterans Affairs and Reservation Benefits… by controlling fraud and waste.
- Do not cover abortions with public funds
- Do not cover people in the United State illegally
- Allow individuals and small businesses to for groups and consortiums to get better rates
- Allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines
- Allow portable coverage (allowing you to take your insurance with you when you leave a job or move)
- Pay on results not on number of procedures
- No more exclusions because of pre-existing conditions by insurance companies
- Crack-down on insurance fraud
- Allow coverage of natural supplements, natural and holistic procedures like chiropractic care, acupuncture etc by insurance coverage
- Force Big Pharma to honor price reduction they offered Team Obama
- Allow generic medications to be covered by insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, etc.
- Allow sharing of information and encourage the reduction of duplication of records… but not kept and managed by the government or in a central database by a company like GE, who is in bed with Team Obama. In today’s world if large companies and groups like Kaiser, Blue Cross, Medicaid, Cigna etc kept their own central databases, forwarding information electronically or giving a copy to the patient to hand carry to avoid the duplication of procedures or tests is and would be easy. Perhaps some the unspent stimulus money could go toward helping some of these companies updating their record systems, which would also create some permanent and temporary jobs. A central database of everyone’s information is just to tempting for future problems.
If the above measures were enacted, we could pay for the 5 to 8 million who are not insured and not are insurable, lower or at least maintain our costs without changing the quality of our medical care in the United States, keep additional government intrusion out of our lives and prevent rationing.
Add to this the ideas of dozens and dozens of present and ex-Governors, Senators and Congress people plus CEO’s of companies and experts in economics and medical care from the financial end, we could perhaps level the cost increase for a few years and improve our care for everyone.
Everyone agrees that we need some kind of reform. This kind of reform, not the ObamaCare versions (any of them)
Posted: Daily Thought Pad
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