by Elizabeth A. Marion

Created on: March 22, 2010   Last Updated: March 23, 2010

America needs to learn from its own history and the health care reform debate is history in the making. We can learn a lot from it if we are willing. And what we can learn from this is mostly about our leaders. How they have dealt with this issue and tried to sell it, tells us a lot about them.

The first lesson we have learned is a sad one. We have learned that the leaders of this country are willing to lie to get what they want. It doesn't matter whether the legislation they're pushing is good or bad. The dishonesty is inexcusable. Harry Reid has been the worst of them all.

As someone who has read the majority of all of the health care bills, I have been able to tell when some of the congressmen have been lying to me and that has proved to be very helpful. Reid has lied repeatedly about the contents of this bill and results of passing this bill.

Many democrats have claimed that this bill will make Medicare better or more efficient. They have also talked about how passing Obamacare would liken them to the people who created Medicare.

They can rest assured that it will because they are passing another program that we cannot afford and will eventually lead to rationing. They haven't done anything to solve the problems in Medicare. They're only expanding Medicare and putting more people into a broken system.

Medicare already rations care and now the program will be even more strained by a sudden surge of new patients that it cannot afford to cover. Straining this program will not make care any better and will not make Medicare more efficient.

Many Congressmen have also claimed that the health insurance mandate is constitutional, citing car insurance requirements as a precedent. The car insurance argument is one of the most absurd arguments I have heard throughout the entire health care debate.

The first reason is that car insurance and health insurance are two extremely different things and it is absurd to treat them as if they are the same things. Someone who buys health insurance is not then going to drive their health insurance on a publicly funded road.

Furthermore it is inaccurate, or in other words dishonest, to say that the law already forces people to buy car insurance. People are only required to get car insurance once they make the choice to buy a car.

People make the choice themselves to buy cars and when they do, only then do they have to take on the full responsibilities of owning a car.

Another lesson we have learned from this debate is that the members of Congress are much better at making excuses than anything else. They have made excuse after excuse for the bribes and the hypocrisy and the lack of transparency.

We have also heard many excuses about why Congress can't do better on health care reform. We have heard over and over about how the bill will create jobs, help the economy, and give health care to those who do not have it, but we have also heard the excuse that the bill is not perfect but it's better than nothing. If the bill is so great, why are the people who are voting for it advertising it as "Well, it's better than nothing"?

Many Americans run to the government for help, refusing to learn from the repeated lessons the government is not reliable and rarely knows best. Congress does not solve problems. It creates programs, and with those programs come problems.

They care about their own goals and ignore their constituents when it serves their purposes. It is time that America learned that today's problems cannot be solved by more entitlement programs and more reliance on Congress.

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