YES, YES for Fairness

YES, YES, vote for fairness on November 8th. A Yes on Issue 3 will stop Obamacare and a Yes on Issue 2 , SB5, will give fairness to taxpayers over government unions.

Yes on Issue 3, the Ohio Healthcare Freedom Amendment will protect Ohioans’ freedom to make individual healthcare and health insurance decisions. Yes will prevent government from forcing you to buy health insurance and charging you anything it wants in the future without your consent. Yes will reduce government intervention which always increases regulations, drives up costs and unfairly selects winners and losers. Why should some people be more equal than others? Yes will stop the ‘death panels’ called Independent Payment Advisory Boards included in Obamacare.

Vote yes on this proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution to prevent government from imposing a fine on you for not purchasing health insurance. Is it fair for the government to fine you because you choose to take personal responsibility for your health care? You should be outraged that you must pay a fine for exercising liberty.

One argument put forth in favor of Obamacare says that the sick who are not insured will overburden the health care industry. But we all know that costs never diminish when bureaucracy is involved. Even now, the government constantly raises the cost estimates for Obamacare. Have you looked at a medical bill lately or carried home the papers from a visitation to a hospital? Paperwork can easily reach the depth of an inch. Multiple pages are even necessary for simple emergency procedures. Government meddling in what should be a free market health care system has resulted in unbelievable waste. Soon to be implemented are 140,000 new medical codes that your doctor must use; many are absurd like the code for being injured in a chicken coop. Do you really believe that costs will go down or freedoms expanded if Obamacare survives? Vote YES on 3.

Yes on Issue 2 is also about fairness to the taxpayers. Government employees’ union contracts are involved. Public workers have many and varied occupations, a minority of them being the highly profiled teachers, police and firefighters. They all have more job security, better health care plans and better retirement benefits than private sector employees. A web site, www.BetterOhio.org highlights a few reasons to vote yes on SB5. It would ask public employees to pay at least 15% of the cost of their health insurance; taxpayers would still pay the rest. Unfortunately, that is only half of what private sector workers currently pay. At least it stops the bleeding from municipal budgets. Cities across Ohio are finding it hard to raise enough funds to cover government’s union workers. In this difficult time of 9.2% unemployment, is it fair for union employees to ask private sector Ohioans to pay for their gold-plated health insurance? As the mayor of Toledo, Ohio said, “it’s not about taking away contractual rights from union employees, it’s about stabilizing our system.”

Yes on Issue 2 ties job performance to rewarding or firing workers. It also puts an end to automatic pay increases something most of us do not enjoying at our workplaces. Teachers, for example, automatically advance through seniority not effective service and SB5 would attempt to correct this problem.

Issue 2 asks government employees to pay at least 10% to their publically funded retirement plans rather than pay nothing and force taxpayers to pay the rest. Private sector workers and self-employed workers, on the other hand, must fund their own retirement plans. Again, is this fair? Why are private workers personally responsible for their retirement investments as public workers’ pensions are supported by them? Some Ohio cities now pay out half of their budgets as retirement benefits to retired government employees.

An ad running on radio for Issue 2 claims that SB5 will make it harder to negotiate for enough firefighters to do the job thus causing slower response times and more deaths. It asserts that only firefighters know the proper staffing level. Really? Can you think of any business or industry that lets employees determine proper staffing, assignments or goals of the organization? Scare tactics will work only if the public does not question details.

Contrary to advertised claims, Issue 2 will continue to allow public employees to negotiate wages and working conditions. But they cannot strike. Strikes, of course, are and have always been great ways for unions to demand more benefits from their employers. Is it fair that unionized workers set the terms for hiring and pay? Why should some workers be more equal than others? Should not the employers determine the level of cost to the taxpayers? Yet unions always demand a bigger cut of tax revenue. Even when tough times prevail, they demand concessions. Has a strike every resulted in workers demanding less?

Vote YES, YES on Issues 2 and 3. It’s all about fairness to Ohioans.