ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT HAS JUST BEGUN

NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA -- Thanks for NOTHING: that's what Americans ought to tell Congress when their legislators return for Thanksgiving after having passed the largest expansion of government in 40 years, columnist Scott Holleran wrote in an op-ed released by Americans for Free Choice in Medicine (AFCM).

Ten years after the sweeping Clinton health care plan was opposed by conservative Republicans, conservative Republicans are forcing Americans into government-run health care, Holleran said.

Noting that GOP leaders, like their nemesis, Hillary Clinton, refused to divulge details of the legislation, Holleran pointed to sweeping new regulations that forbid those with more than $ 10,000 in assets from participating in the drug subsidy.

Holleran, whose articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit News and the Miami Herald, asserted that the GOP Congress's historic approval of Medicare expansion proves that conservatives, by punishing the so-called rich with higher premiums, oppose the right to make money.

Conservatives do not even practice compassion, he observed, instead, they seek to herd older Americans into HMOs and deprive younger Americans of any shred of financial independence. By adding drug subsidies to Medicare, Republicans, led by President Bush, believe in one basic idea: Big Government.

Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, (AFCM), founded in 1993, publishes a consumer's guide and tutorial to MSAs on its Web site and it is the nation's only educational organization based on individual rights, personal responsibility and free market ideas in medicine.