As an Orthodox Christian, I beleive we need to speak up for what is right. This health care reform is very scary. It doesn't work in Canada and Europe how does this congress think it is going to work here. They are going to bankrupt our country. I don't want a death panel telling me if I should die or not. They have no right. They will be interfering with God's plan for that person who is suffering. They are not listening to what the general public has to say. They want to do what they want to do. That doesn't sound like democracy to me. It is scary to think where our Country is going to end up in a couple of years.

Thank you for your posting Thelma. This is precisely why we decided to cover this issue because there are so many unfounded rumors out there. Please rest your heart on the issue of "death panels". This is part of the half truths out there in attempts to scare folks. The "death panel" issue has been disproved by so many truth seeking individuals. There is no such provision in the current plans being discussed.

OCN is proud to present the truth as we learn it. We urge you to educate yourself to the best of your ability on these important issues. Don't just listen to one side of any issue. Do your own research of course pray to always find the truth. ST. John tell us the truth will set you free.

I think a fundamental mistake is that whenever something is labeled "NAZI," Americans equate that with a charge that something is racist or genocidal. The truth is that the NAZIs were socialists, and their agenda included national health care with a strong does of eugenics.

Eugenics has been popular since the early 20th century with American 'progressives.' This has been noted with concern by many European leftists, including the one who wrote this:

The liberals are howling bout the unfairness of these attacks, led by Sarah Palin, revived by her “Death Panel” talk and equipped with a dexterous new speech writer who is even adding footnotes to her press releases.

But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.

In 1972, a year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion on demand nationwide, virtually all children with trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, were born. Less than a decade later, with the widespread availability of pre-natal genetic testing, as many as 90 percent of women whose babies were pre-natally diagnosed with the genetic condition chose to abort the child.

Keep in mind that the preceding was written by a dyed-in-the-wool European socialist.

Barney Frank reacted in a typical fashion. The lady's question could have been phrased better, but the same forces currently campaigning for national health care have been present agitating for absolute abortion and for eugenics in the past. The NAZI party was a big proponent of national health care, eugenics, and other progessive schemes like old-age pensions, minimum wage laws, and gun control. The current proposals in Congress have many elements which hearken back to various aspects of the NAZI regime.

This needs to be engaged and discussed, rather than simply dismissed as somehow indicative of the decline of our democracy.

Also, the legal carry of legal firearms should not be construed as somehow disturbing to the Orthodox Christian mind. The exercise of the 2nd Amendment should be no more troubling than that of the 1st.

Every time someone says that the English or the French or the Canadian system doesn't work, I have to wonder if they aren't on some cloud cuckooland world in the skies. We are rated below every industrialized country on the planet and plenty that aren't.
Our present system has death panels composed of corporate thinking stooges who ensure profits are kept high by denying claims, raising premiums, limiting their liability. No other industrial country in the world allows insurance for profit. None. They must be nonprofit corporations. Ours extract 30 percent or more in fees and offer a substandard coverage, and to increase profits, more substandard each year.
Christians should back nonprofit insurance plans, and probably band together, eventually, behind a single payer system and let insurance companies go into a line of business that uses their wealth and power to help and not hinder the United States.

There may not be anything called "death panels" in Obamacare. However, there is something called "comparative effectiveness research" that will institute age-based rationing. Obama's advisors Ezekiel Emanuel and Cass Sunstein believe in age-based rationing, and Emanuel is a fellow of the Hastings Institute, which has been teaching "duty to die", "right to die", and euthanasia for decades. Obama is already cutting Medicare payments to specialists, especially cardiologists, even before his health care proposal is passed. Will we end up with the situation in the UK, where stent-based angioplasty is denied to anyone over 59? And Obama's proposal calls for financing his whole program by cutting Medicare. This will inevitably mean age-based rationing.

Obama advisor and science "czar" John Holdren has been a population control extremist, and wrote that babies aren't even human until they are "socialized". Obama advisor David Blumenthal says that we should slow down medical innovation to save on costs. His electronic records program is designed to reach into every doctor' office, and has the potential to put a government bureaucrat (armed with "comparative effectiveness research") between you and your doctor.

I would approve of a simple program that would ensure that the uninsured can get insurance, and have access to medical care. But I am totally against this gargantuan, coercive program that is staffed by anti-life "czars", reaches its tentacles into every doctor's office, and wages war especially against seniors, the disabled, and infants, both born and not yet born.

Instead of ensuring that every American has access to health care, Obamacare seeks to deny health care to millions whom the "czars" deem "just not worth it." And Obama himself said regarding a senior's treatment, "just take a pain pill instead of the [life-saving] surgery." He and his advisors also call all health care for people over 65 "end of life care".

St. Ambrose of Milan stood up for human life, against an emperor who acted against it. Orthodox hierarchs, priests, and laity should stand up against our emperor, not criticize people at the town halls who are rightly afraid for their very lives.

I believe to a degree that, the liberals have some good intentions with a service to help those who cannot afford it. However, as we know good intentions often are not manifested to the best that they could be.

Healthcare via the government to me is not good, it is not charitable, and it helps no one. Let us consider that government is considered by definition the only entity with the legal authority to exercise force. IF this is true than I cannot see how the good intentions of state-run healthcare can even be considered good if it will be funded via the violence of government.

I believe that a good intentioned idea best manifests itself through a charitable act, and charity is one that is defined as being a selfless, voluntary act done out compassion for those who do not have something you have. It is also my strongest belief, that like any other government run program the majority of the money will go into the hands of the wrong people or it will be wasted by government bureaucracy and paperwork, so to speak. I make my argument from a Libertarian, Free Market, and Christian standpoint. Although I do not want to advertise, please visit: mises.org in order to understand my point of view a little bit more better.

As someone from Canada, I'm gonna say that most people in Canada would definitly not trade our 'nazi-socialized' health care system away for the American one. Of course there are problems, but I would much rather have to go to the hospital in Canada than in the USA. And no, there are no death panels, government run organ stealing operations, or places to put newborns to sleep.

Thank you Canadian Listener!!! I am so tired of people saying that doing nothing is better than trying to do some good. Really people, Christians, we live in a fallen world. Nothing will be perfect, get over it. As a duty, though, to our fellow mankind, we must find a way to provide basic health care for everyone! How dare you be so selfish and fearful and want to keep the great things you have at the cost of denying the poor what we are supposed to give out of faith. Our nation is and will be judged by God for how we treat the "least of these"

As a duty, though, to our fellow mankind, we must find a way to provide basic health care for everyone!

I don't think anyone disagrees with that assessment. The question is what to do about it? I lived in Poland for three years, and worked there under their system. Their health care system was funded by a payroll tax, whose net effect was to exacerbate the unemployment situation. Companies could not afford to expand, because the incremental cost of adding workers was too high compared to the added value.

So, a poorly designed funding scheme can make poverty worse by driving marginal workers into unemployment. Sorry to be so technical, but economic facts are what they are.

So the issue is not so much should people have access to affordable medical care, but rather how to provide abundant and low-cost medical care? One model is to (essentially) fund medical care through taxes. That model has been more successful in Canada with its various provincial plans, than it has in Europe which has true single-payer.

The U.S. system currently is a mixed bag where 50% of all medicine is government-controlled, and the rest is primarily the purview of private insurance. Our current system is expensive and bloated, and pill-happy. I don't think many people are defending the status quo, but the alternatives to it (as I experienced in Eastern Europe) can easily be worse.

Hence, the caution.