Un-American?

So now the wonderful Nancy Pelosi is saying that people who oppose socialized medicine at town hall meetings are un-American. Are you kidding me? The democrats invented dissent. Remember "Hell No, We Won't Go"? The double standard is beyond insane. As a former military wife I tend to consider myself patriotic, the opposite of un-American, but it seems now that if I disagree with a nationalized healthcare system I can't be patriotic at all. The problem is that we aren't a socialist country, I don't understand why supporting this type of legislation would be American or patriotic at all. I'm not un-American, I'm simply against this new socialized America that Obama is trying desperately to create in record time.

Also, as a former military spouse I have a different prospective than a lot of people in this country. I have lived with government healthcare. I have been forced to wait weeks or months for care for issues that are urgent and painful. I have arrived at appointment to find that my doctor has been deployed, and I have been told that no referrals are available because the specialist has been transferred to another base. I have also had to deal with the fact that throughout a very high risk pregnancy I never saw the same doctor twice and no one knew my history at all. I had to tell doctors my history as they skimmed my medical file in front of me. The files were replaced by computer records near the end of my husbands military service and they would look at medications and short notes to try to peice together medical conditions. It was substandard care, luckily for me there were other options, private emergency rooms for a large co-pay if things got too bad or urgent. If everything is government run there will be no options like that. That's horrifying to me.

One more aspect of government run healthcare, which is what this bill is leading us into, is the giant hmo-type mentality. This means that care, prescriptions available, doctors, specialists, treatments offered are all determined by the insurer, the government. At this point doctors are advocates of the patients, but when they are hired by the insurance company whose advocates will they be? Not mine. I also hate to think of the halt of the great medical advances this country has made as a direct result of companies being able to charge a premium for prescriptions in the years before the patent expires. People won't do it for free and government hiring tends to breed inefficiency and apathy. The whole thing makes my head hurt.