They Think You're Stupid (17 page)

Third, seniors must be allowed to leave the balance of their personal accounts to their widows, children, and any other heirs they designate. It is unconscionable that those currently receiving benefits receive a near negative rate of return on their money, are taxed twice on their benefits, and upon their death the balance of their earned benefits is returned to the system. "Massa" and "Uncle Sam" appear to be the same thing. Social Security benefits are monies earned during the retirees' working years, and retirees should be able to leave the balance of their accounts to their families, not to "Massa."

The
health care system in the United States is severely sick. I am not talking about the doctors and health care professionals who find a way to do their jobs despite bureaucratic barriers and the fear of frivolous lawsuits. I am referring to all the influences by the federal government, federal regulatory agencies, state governments, state regulatory agencies, insurance companies, and trial lawyers. Seemingly every entity imaginable except the patient and the doctor exert a degree of influence over health care policy, health care delivery, and liability laws. All of these bodies, working at times in concert and at times as adversaries, have produced an over-priced and over-regulated system that prices millions of citizens out of the health insurance market while creating a paperwork and compliance nightmare for health care providers.

The health care system is made worse because of the treatment of insurance premiums in the tax code. Businesses can deduct premiums they pay for employee health care benefits as a business expense, but individual citizens cannot deduct the premiums they pay when they purchase their own health care insurance. That's part of the problem. Allowing businesses and individuals the same tax treatment in the tax code, and expanding the use of health savings accounts, will allow free market principles to help bring runaway costs under control. The principle is a simple one. People will spend their money more wisely than they will spend somebody else's money.

Decisions on treatment options and pricing are not made between patients and their doctors and are not based on free market principles. Instead, bureaucrats tucked safely away in Washington, D.C. and in our state capitals crunch numbers, contort statistics, and cavort with insurance company lobbyists to ensure that patients receive some predetermined level of care that is often inadequate or even unnecessary. Meanwhile, litigious lawyers wait with bated breath outside operating rooms to sue a doctor or even the whole hospital for negligence or malpractice.

The Medicare program is facing insolvency as baby boomers approach retirement. The recently enacted drug benefit only compounds the problem. It burdens future generations with trillions of dollars of new debt and jeopardizes the existing drug coverage of many working and retired Americans. The costs associated with millions of Americans lacking health care insurance, increased regulations on insurance companies, increased costs to the individual states to administer Medicaid programs, and trial lawyers who abuse the legal system with frivolous malpractice lawsuits also contribute to the myriad of problems facing our nation's health care system.

Health care delivery and the Medicare system are integral parts of our daily lives and of our economic infrastructure. Numerous problems exist in each, but, fortunately, we know how to solve the systemic challenges to efficient and affordable health care. Unfortunately, many members of our federal and state legislatures lack the necessary will and bold leadership to address the problems adequately. Many politicians feel that their chances for reelection are harmed with any mention of reducing government influence in health care.

The "new slavery," economic slavery, is more dangerous than the old slavery because you cannot see it in the public square or down on the plantation. As a result, it is tolerated through the generations because people feel there is little they can do to unshackle themselves from its grip on their lives. Economic slavery does not discriminate against one's race, sex, age, or religion. Those responsible for perpetuating economic slavery only care about one thing: controlling your life by controlling a growing amount of your money. Some of us may have arrived to this nation on the Mayflower, and some of us on slave ships, but we all are in the same boat now.

All too often we read in the papers, see on television, or even hear in person a member of Congress bemoan the fact that it is just too difficult to advocate and enact fundamental policy change in Washington, D.C. The complaining members are, of course, always champions of policy change, but they just do not think they will be able to get the necessary support from their colleagues to tackle the big issues effectively.

Unfortunately, Washington, D.C. has become the "City of Doubt." Many of the would-be leaders in Washington campaign on promises of being able to fix problems, and then weeks after they are elected they are right back into politics as usual mode.

I believe the public is much more hopeful than members of Congress for the possibility of aggressive policy solutions. Veteran politicians have learned to campaign on hope and optimism, but then they go back to Washington and maintain "business as usual." They get away with maintaining the status quo because most voters turn off their political antennas the day after the election. Veteran politicians depend upon most voters having short memories or no memory at all.

If the majority of the electorate does not express a new voice after election day, the City of Doubt will never become a City of Hope. The City of Doubt will never replace the tax code mess or fix the broken Social Security structure. A City of Hope can fix these problems. We do not suffer from a deficiency of "know-how" in this country; we suffer from a deficiency of hope in Washington, D.C.

There are millions of success stories in every endeavor of life that prove we can accomplish anything when hope supersedes doubt. So why do most of our members of Congress campaign on hope and take doubt with them to Washington, D.C.? They either do not know how to lead or they lack the courage to lead.

Many professional politicians simply believe that if they do not take a bold leadership position on issues, their opponent in the next election will have no ammunition to use against them. Doing nothing is the politically safe option. Since the electoral process takes a long time to replace people, the public has got to push the elected officials that are in Congress now to do the right things and to do them with urgency.

Quite frankly, I am sick and tired of the status quo in D.C., and I believe millions of other voters feel the same way. We were founded as a nation of hope, not as a nation of doubt. Many of those we have elected have forgotten this principle.

The City of Doubt also refers to any city in our country where people have lost hope that it is possible to change the political status quo. The City of Doubt exists anywhere people have lost hope that it is possible for all citizens to work for and achieve economic freedom, and in any city, town, farm, or hollow where people have lost hope in their individual, God-given abilities to leave this great nation a little better than they found it for their children and grandchildren.

Tom Rath and the late Dr. Donald O. Clifton discuss the effects of lost hope in their book
How Full Is Your Bucket?
Rath and Clifton tell a heartbreaking story of the devastating and sometimes deadly effects of losing one's hope.

Following the Korean War, Major (Dr.) William E. Mayer, who would later become the U.S. Army's chief psychiatrist, studied 1,000 American prisoners of war who had been detained in a North Korean camp. He was particularly interested in examining one of the most extreme and perversely effective cases of psychological warfare on record--one that had a devastating impact on its subjects.

American soldiers had been detained in camps that were not considered especially cruel or unusual by conventional standards. The captive soldiers had adequate food, water, and shelter. They weren't subjected to common physical tactics of the time such as having bamboo shoots driven under their fingernails. In fact, fewer cases of physical abuse were reported in the North Korean POW camps than in prison camps from any other major military conflict throughout history.

Why, then, did so many American soldiers die in these camps? They weren't hemmed in with barbed wire. Armed guards didn't surround the camps. Yet no soldier ever tried to escape. Furthermore, these men regularly broke rank and turned against each other, sometimes forming close relationships with their North Korean captors.

When the survivors were released to a Red Cross group in Japan, they were given the chance to phone loved ones to let them know they were alive. Very few bothered to make the call.

Upon returning home, the soldiers maintained no friendships or relationships with each other. Mayer described each man as being in a mental "solitary confinement cell . . . without any steel or concrete."

Mayer had discovered a new disease in the POW camps--a disease of extreme hopelessness. It was not uncommon for a soldier to wander into his hut and look despairingly about, deciding there was no use in trying to participate in his own survival. He would go into a corner alone, sit down, and pull a blanket over his head. And he would be dead within two days.

The soldiers actually called it "give up-itis." The doctors labeled it "marasmus," meaning, in Mayer's words, "a lack of resistance, a passivity." If the soldiers had been hit, spat upon, or slapped, they would have become angry. Their anger would have given them the motivation to survive. But in the absence of motivation, they simply died, even though there was no medical justification for their deaths.

Despite relatively minimal physical torture, "marasmus" raised the overall death rate in the North Korean POW camps to an incredible 38%--the highest POW death rate in U.S. military history. Even more astounding was that half of these soldiers died simply because they had given up. They had completely surrendered, both mentally and physically.

How could this have happened? The answers were found in the extreme mental tactics that the North Korean captors used. They employed what Mayer described as the "ultimate weapon" of war.

Mayer reported that the North Korean's objective was to "deny men the emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships." To do this, the captors used four primary tactics: informing, self-criticism, breaking loyalty to leadership and country, and withholding all positive emotional support.

To encourage withholding, the North Koreans gave prisoners rewards such as cigarettes when they snitched on one another. But neither the offender nor the soldier reporting the violation was punished--the captors encouraged this practice for a different reason. Their intent was to break relationships and turn the men against each other.

To promote self-criticism, the captors gathered groups of 10 or 12 soldiers and employed what Mayer described as "a corruption of group psychotherapy." In these sessions, each man was required to stand up in front of the group and confess
all the bad things he had done
--as well as
all the good things he could have done but failed to do
. The most important part of this tactic was that the soldiers were not "confessing" to the North Koreans, but to their own peers.

The third major tactic that the captors employed was breaking loyalty to leadership and country. The primary way they did this was by slowly and relentlessly undermining a soldier's allegiance to his superiors. The consequences were ghastly.

In one case, a colonel instructed one of his men not to drink the water from a rice paddy field because he knew the organisms in the water might kill him. The soldier looked at his colonel and remarked, "Buddy, you ain't no colonel anymore; you're just a lousy prisoner like me. You take care of yourself, and I'll take care of me." The soldier died of dysentery a few days later.

If a soldier received a supportive letter from home, the captors withheld it. All negative letters, however--such as those telling of a relative passing away, or ones in which a wife wrote that she had given up on her husband's return as was going to remarry--were delivered to soldiers immediately.

The effects were devastating: The soldiers had nothing to live for and lost basic belief in themselves and their loved ones, not to mention God and country.

Excerpted from Tom Rath and Dr. Donald O. Clifton,
How Full Is Your Bucket?
(New York: Gallup Press, 2004), 17-23. Used by permission.

We can see from the experiences of some American POWs during the Korean War that, when taken to the extreme, the loss of hope can exert some of the most debilitating effects on our lives and the lives of our family members, and those we lead, work with or interact with on a regular basis.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also noted the negative effects of a lack of hope in his famous and moving "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech: "You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it . . . . He kept the slaves fighting among themselves."

Do political leaders in the U.S. utilize the tactics of Pharaoh or the North Koreans to create doubt in the minds of the public that enactment of aggressive policy solutions is ever possible? Of course they do. Democrats use these same tactics when they pit groups of U.S. citizens against each other with their divisive class warfare rhetoric instead of working on fixing our crumbling economic infrastructure.

They create doubt in people's minds that they can achieve economic freedom without assistance from a government program. They tell those in the so-called middle and lower economic classes that they are being kept down by the rich, and they tell Blacks that all their problems are caused by racist Whites. Democrats scare the elderly into thinking that Republicans want to cut their Social Security benefits or privatize the Social Security system.

They frame the issue of abortion around a woman's right to control her body against the men who want to control women's bodies. They have fought to take God out of our public schools, our courthouses, our Pledge of Allegiance, and have told school children they can no longer sing Christmas carols.