Reform Rx – Shoot to Kill

An August Reform Rx piece entitled Unreal, Unhealthy, Un-American covered a subject that one would never think of being part of the health care debate: guns. The column piece was written in reaction to the carrying of guns to town hall meetings or near Presidential speaking events by right-wing fanatics to inject intimidation into the health care debate.

Imagine how my ears perked up this morning when I heard NPR’s Cokie Roberts reporting on health care reform bills saying:

And add to that, Renee, we have these continuing fights over abortion and immigration. And now we're discovering there are going to be new fights over guns in the insurance bill. And so, the work just gets harder and harder to get it passed. (Emphasis mine.)

The full NPR report can be listened to here and the passage above is at about 2:40:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120676331

How are guns and the intrusion of this divisive issue being scatter shot into the debate? A tour around the internet yielded these insights of attempts to poison health care reform:

The Examiner

The day before the Senate passed the $848 billion health bill on a party-line vote, the Virginia-based Gun Owners of America sent out a mass alert to its 300,000 members, warning them that the legislation "will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database. ... This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned or any determination of post traumatic stress disorder or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms."

The Freedom Medium

They will attempt to make their case by presenting statistics showing that gun violence causes health care resources to be spent in ways that could be better utilized in other areas.
Of course, many of the American public will fall for this gibberish, not realizing that it is simply another ploy by the Obama administration to drum up support for an increasingly unpopular health care reform bill, while having the added bonus of being an assault on Second Amendment rights as well.

Buckeye Firearms Association

Don't forget the new taxes on guns and ammo to help provide insurance for those poor Crips, Bloods, Triad, Mongols and Mexican Mafia members who find themselves suffering from uninsured gunshot wounds incurred during a drug deal gone wrong. The anti-gun possibilities are limited only by the imagination.
Please don't delude yourself into thinking that this would only be part of any "public option" insurance plan. The private insurance companies are going to be in direct competition with any of the pre-existing or new government insurance plans, so if the public plans get an "upcharge" for gun ownership you know the private ones are going to demand this extra money, too.

All right-wing forces are allied against health care reform and every conceivable issue group’s attack will need to be countered. In this case, the fact is that there is absolutely nothing in the two health care bills that addresses or has any intended consequence regarding guns. Period. Rinse and repeat: period. Apparently there is no honor on the right; if a bill cannot be legitimately defeated, just assassinate it.