July 15th, 2009:

via RNC | Future of American Health Care Survey.

I got an email today from RNC chairman Michael Steele urging the recipients to complete a new survey about their opinions of health care reform. The email begins with one of the right-wings most repeated talking points. Here’s the message from Mr. Steele:

Dear Tom,

We do need health care reform in America, but there is a right way — and a wrong way — to go about it.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats want a government-run health care system that puts a Washington bureaucrat between American families and their doctors. And they are hurrying to pass and sign a bill as quickly as they can.

Firstly, there is no health care system in the United States. There is a health care industry. The profit motive drives the train in the U.S. health care industry.

There are already many layers of bureaucrats between patients and their doctors right now. You can’t see your doctor without the secretary filing paperwork for the insurance company to pay for it. If the insurance company approves the treatment, and that is a crap shoot, then you are required to pay estimated co-pays up front. Then you wait for the insurance bureaucrats to approve payment.

Secondly, if we use Medicare as an example, under the public plan much the same thing happens as the private insurance plans. A  receptionist files paperwork and the doctor gets paid.

There is no “Washington bureaucrat” involved. Inventing a problem then offering a solution for the invented problem is called a straw-man argument.

I began filling out the form asking for my personal information, my name, physical and email addresses and such, and then began to fill in the radio buttons on the survey questions thinking this was going to be fun.

Then I actually read the questions. They were nothing but right-wing talking points meant to scare common folk into rejecting the public health care plan.

The first two questions are fairly tame, but then the fun begins on question 3, “Do you believe that your health care decisions should be made by you and your doctor, and not government bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.?”

The rest of the survey is a “hair-on-fire” Republican wacko snow job. The survey is really asking “Aren’t you a good Republican?” or “Does it concern you that there are liberals in America?”

This is the survey Steele sent me. See for yourself:

1. Do you believe that the state of America’s health care system is in crisis?

Yes

No

Undecided

2. What is your biggest concern regarding health care in America as it is today?

Cost

Quality

Availability

Other:

3. Do you believe that your health care decisions should be made by you and your doctor, and not government bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.?

Yes

No

Undecided

4. Do you believe it is right for the federal government to use age and life expectancy as criteria for determining access to health care?

Yes

No

Undecided

5. Estimates show that the Democrats’ plan could cost more than $1.7 trillion dollars. Do you believe that America can afford this added debt when the deficit has already reached record levels?

Yes

No

Undecided

6. If you have private health insurance, please rate your level of satisfaction with your coverage:

Excellent

Good

Satisfactory

Unsatisfactory

N/A

7. Rationing of health care in countries with socialized medicine has led to patients dying because they were forced to wait too long to receive treatment. How concerned are you that this would be inevitable in the U.S. under the Democrats’ plan?

Extremely Concerned

Mildly Concerned

Not Concerned

Don’t Care

8. Do you approve of the Republican plan to give small businesses tax breaks to cover the cost of their employees’ heath care insurance?

Yes

No

Don’t know enough about it yet

9. Do you believe the federal Government can provide better health insurance than your current plan?

Yes

No

Undecided

Not applicable

10. Over 120 million Americans currently receive health care insurance through their employment. Should this private sector health coverage be preserved in any health care reform plan?

Yes

No

Undecided

11. Does it concern you that the Democrats are trying to ram health care legislation through Congress THIS MONTH to limit the American people’s opportunity to evaluate it?

Extremely Concerned

Mildly Concerned

Not Concerned

Don’t Care

12. Does it concern you that the liberal media has gone to unprecedented levels to only give Obama’s views on health care reform and no one else’s?

Extremely Concerned

Mildly Concerned

Not Concerned

Don’t Care

Does it concern you that the RNC has gone to these lengths – fear and outright lies – to once again to poison the minds of the unsuspecting?

The email ends with these two sentences.

You and the RNC are all that stand between our sensible Republican plan for real health care reform and the Democrats’ scheme to take more of your hard-earned income to pay for other people’s health care while limiting yours.

So please complete your Future of American Health Care survey online right now and support our efforts to ensure our health care freedoms by making a special RNC contribution if you can. Thank you.

The game being played here is the same as with all politics. I think they are trying to get the respondents  fired up for the sole purpose of raising money.