Healthcare may not be a right but what makes you think that your life is more important than someone who serves you a doughnut at the coffee shop Sarah. Why is it that Americans feel that it is so very wrong to help each other. I want my family, friends and neighbours to be healthy and get the help they need when they are sick. Americans pay so many middlemen and lawyers that a good part the money and resources are wasted. Healthy people are actually productive people....

Ron Paul has no heart. And spews propaganda. All of his ilk are the same, they just don't care.Obama is doing the best he can and is met with resistance at every step by these people. It's disgusting. Now if he will just realize the US is on the wrong side in the Georgia matter.

What is the Humanity all about than if not to help your fellow citizen when in dire need? I recon that's where America has got it wrong.

Shauna, If I steal your life savings, and donate it to charity, it is still stealing. Wanting to keep ones own hard earned money is not greed, and spending other's isn't compassion. I respect your opinion though.

BRAVO! Well written and Documented piece! This is the FIRST piece on Russia Today that EXCEEDS "Western" Standards! The reporter deserves a raise! PLEASE Russia Today, PLEASE, I beg you to KEEP following this story! This story is what will bring the USA to knees within 10 YEARS! WE(USA) will gladly take "Medvedev and Putin "Legs" because the USA is going down due to Barrack Hussein O'bama. He is a combination of a Marxist/Leninist & Socialist. I have a question for my Russians friends, "DO YOU HAVE THE PROBLEM IN RUSSIA WITH THE WELFARE STATE LIKE THE USA"? BRAVO again and finally a piece that has "Hit the nail" on the head!

The purpose of the United States was to establish a free society with a constitutionally bound Republic whose sole purpose was to protect individual rights. (Certainly we have strayed far from that goal, and further toward the very systems we revolted from.) Individual rights are political rights, not economic rights - you have a right to live free of force and coercion, to make your own decisions and receive just consequences from your actions. You have a right to give to charity, voluntarily, or to ask others for assistance. You do not have a right to the product of any other man, no matter how valuable that product is to you, or how "needy" you are. Our health industry (like so many other industries) has been heavily regulated for years leading to increased costs and nill competition; yet it used to be that shriner hospitals and charity within hospitals, via individual doctors (including Ron Paul, who has given medical services for free) took care of those who could not afford medical treatment. The free market inspires people to trade value for value, and to be sure, very often people value other people's lives. It is a productive, innovative, mutualy beneficial system, which sadly props up many failing socialist economies around the world- and then proceeds to be shamed for its success. Now that is disgusting. Laissez-faire capitalism is in actuality a beautiful, bountiful system when government force is taken out of the equation. If you truly cared about individuals, then you would fight for individual rights, and the economic system of justice which is capitalism.

Mr.Ron Paul is part of the ruling elites and plays important part in manufacturing illusion about freedom and liberties which existed for a short period of time after the Revolution. He is part of entertainment/circus or safety valve for social discontent. Shortly after the inevitable happened, power corrupts and thugs took over. Russian Revolution had similar experience, Mr. Lenin's ideas were quite different from what was practiced when Uncle Joe came to power. Shauna See "Capitalism: A love story" by Micheal Moore and you will get answers to all your questions.

Shauna, there is nothing wrong with wanting to help others. Americans are the most generous people on the planet based upon their charitable giving, and nobody believes it is wrong to help each other. If you believe that you are sadly mistaken. Everyone should be free to help their family, friends and neighbors in any way they see fit, and you should be able to keep the product of your labor which would enable you to do so. However, nobody should be forced against their will to help others.To do so would be immoral and unethical.

I am amazed how anyone in this country believes that it is okay to seize money through coersion from one individual and give it to another. And then has the audacity to call it compassion. Vova2012, that is what I call disgusting!! To call Dr. Paul a propagandist is hilarious. He has been fighting the same fight for over 30 years. As far as Obama is concerned, he campaigned on ending the wars, Patriot Act, rendition, unwarranted wiretaps, etc. Hmmm, how is he doing on that front? He has expanded the wars by bombing other soverign nations, added an additional 30k in Afghanistan, voted to renew and expand the Patriot Act, expanded wiretaps, and actually has made rendition LEGAL! He is continuing to borrow from our foreign creditors and is allowing the FED to continue to print more phantom money. That is called STATUS QUO and he is NO different then the war criminal George Bush! The people need to resist Obamabush and any other politician that follows the establishment. We need more Ron Paul's in Washington!

Thank you, RT for showing the true face of this man, and by extension, others like him. These conspiracy theorists are all the same: people who have nothing but have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by people like Mr Ron Paul, that they are being threatened with having their billions taken away from them should they ever become billionaires. In other words, they are being fed the illusion that they actually stand a reasonable chance of becoming one of the very rich and that someone is trying to take that chance away from them. By playing on their dreams in this way, such politicians and personalities incite them to fight the very measures that could help them attain better standards of living, education and health, which in turn would open the way to the possibility of achieving those very dreams. Why? To gain political power for themselves. Mr Ron Paul and others like him obviously want to keep the people poor and ignorant. This, as anyone who has truly made the effort to understand what fascism is, is classic fascist tactics. Fascism means to 'bind together as you would sticks', and this is what these people and groups are trying to do: bind the people together through a false sense of being under threat from some group, or in this case, their legitimate government.

To understand where Ron Paul is coming from, we need to understand Anglo Saxon Christian [quasi Malthusian] doctrine of diminishing returns. This doctrine claims that there is limited resources in the world and they cannot be shared on equal basis because to give something to some means taking it away from others. It is pity the journalist did not ask him about his health insurance which is paid for by the public. Ron Paul is not against public funded healthcare for people such as himself. He just do not believe that all American citizens should receive healthcare benefits.

Ron Paul says everyone has the right to life: so by his logic, the many Americans who are denied the right to live because the healthcare system holds them ransom, he also fails to mention that those who DO PAY for their health insurance their whole life are denied the coverage they HAVE PAID FOR THEMSELVES because the insurance company finds a technicality and refuses to pay. someone is denied the right to live if something can be done to save them, but someone refuses to do that. People against healthcare reform can talk about freedom and try to justify why people should be left to die, but the fact remains that anybody on their side of the debate is well looked after with regards to healthcare, otherwise they would not be debating against reform!it's so easy to say that people should not be given healthcare when you yourself have healthcare!

What people don't seem to realise is that the first proponents of laissez-faire capitalism believed charity and all that would take care of itself because the Church was the largest provider of charity. The state simply did not need to do such a thing because another organisation was there. Fast forward to secular (let's stick to originally/currently Christian socieites) and you see this vacuum that occurs due to the waning donations towards, and interest in, church had to be filled somewhere. In comes the welfare state. In comes healthcare. Public option, such as in the UK, and France: You (A), pay the government (B), which than pays the doctor. Pure Godless socialism. Private option: You(A), pay insurance executives(B), lobbyists(C), lawyers (D), congressmen(E), advertising agencies(F), broadcast media(G), mistresses(H), mistress's dog (I), bookies (J), and, eventually the doctor (K). Everybody gets a piece of the action. Classic American capitalism. France might be overspending like nuts overall, but tis healthcare system is the best in the world, and it spends less per capita than what the US does. The UK was a model of public medicare gone wrong. It has undergone a total 180 in the past decade, and is one of the best in the world. Canada's system works fine. It's just chronically short of tens of thousands of doctors and nurses. So it's desperately overloaded. To be honest, I'd prefer Ron Paul to Obama or McCain or Clinton. He might be far away from my beliefs, but at least he's been preaching the same tune for 30 years, and has a track record of walking his talk. It's free-market capitalism's greatest strength that is also its greatest weakness, and it's weakness is greater than its strength. It's too easy to do anything for the best CBA possible. For that slightly higher profit margin. At the expense of anything.

Come on Russians, put away your manifesto and read up on European intellectual history. Ron Paul represents the liberalist principles that are basicly the idea behind most of the modern western world, the UN declaration of Human Rights, etc. Individual > community\state - regardless of the popular demand. If you were more fond of these values maybe you wouldnt still wouldnt be dominated so completely by Putin.

You guys who say Ron Paul is part of the ruling elite, a billionaire, who wants to keep the people poor and ignorant .... YOU are totally ignorant of what the man stands for and the facts of his life. 1. He is not a billionaire. He pays his own expenses as much as possible. He refuses congressional perks from the public trough that all the big-government politicians love to eat up. 2. He is frugal with the funds for his congressional office, and returns money to the treasury every year. 3. More than anyone in congress, he speaks honestly and votes consistently for personal liberty for all people, limited government, and friendly trade with all nations. 4. I don't know if he uses the congressional insurance plan; it would be just like him to refuse it. Why don't you ask your Democrat representatives why they refused to require themselves to buy the health care plan that they rammed down our throats? Why do you attack Dr. Paul about that, when the entire congress is the biggest bunch hypocrites and public trough-feeders? They vote themselves exorbitant benefits and get those benefits for life, and you're calling Dr Paul--the one who consistently votes against those benefits--an elitist??? 5. As for your statements about keeping the poor people down and ignorant: There is nowhere in a libertarian philosophy that it says charity is illegal. There can and should be personal charity and locally organized charity. People always have and always will help others. Government should encourage and facilitate charity through incentives if necessary, but shouldn't coerce people into contributing. I'll tell you what keeps the poor people ignorant: keeping them dependent on the government, generation after generation, instead of protecting their liberty and their God-given human right to go make something out of their lives.

...and I need to add another response to jsmith, who talked about people being denied coverage, and also those whose coverage is terminated: 6. Yes, there should be a law to protect people that have faithfully paid into their insurance plan. Insurance companies should not be allowed to terminate them. That is clearly unfair and outrageous. Make it illegal. ... See how simple that was? It didn't even require a 3000 page law. 7. As for denial of coverage, if someone is denied coverage for an existing condition, then yes they should have some recourse, and if congress and the President had been willing, they could have come up with an intelligent plan. Instead the have changed a highly-regulated (just barely free-market) system and changed it into a more highly-regulated (slightly socialist) system. It's going to fail, and the only way they'll be able to "fix it" is by totally socializing the health care industry... and that won't fix anything either, because we are already on the verge of bankruptcy as a nation.

March 29, 2010, 19:14, erastus wrote > You guys who say Ron Paul is part of the ruling elite, a billionaire, who wants to keep the people poor and ignorant .... YOU are totally ignorant of what the man stands for and the facts of his life. > 1. He is not a billionaire. He pays his own expenses as much as possible. He refuses congressional perks from the public trough that all the big-government politicians love to eat up. > 2. He is frugal with the funds for his congressional office, and returns money to the treasury every year. > 3. More than anyone in congress, he speaks honestly and votes consistently for personal liberty for all people, limited government, and friendly trade with all nations. > 4. I don't know if he uses the congressional insurance plan; it would be just like him to refuse it. Why don't you ask your Democrat representatives why they refused to require themselves to buy the health care plan that they rammed down our throats? Why do you attack Dr. Paul about that, when the entire congress is the biggest bunch hypocrites and public trough-feeders? They vote themselves exorbitant benefits and get those benefits for life, and you're calling Dr Paul--the one who consistently votes against those benefits--an elitist??? ====================== Mr.Ron Pauls ACTIONS speak louder than his words/demagoguery. He has constantly refused to form a THIRD option and chose Republican faction/wing of the Ruling Party knowing well that they have been hijacked by religious extremists of the most dangerous kind, version of christian taliban or mullahs if you will.

USA is by essence a one party state, a dictatorship where the people of power are not elected but they are selected. Democracy is an illusion within USA. People like Ron Paul are getting frightened if people are taxed for healthcare, but when it comes to finance the military, he is silent. USA have an overcapacity regarding military needs. They could well shrink the army and start helping it's own people. Buying a coke or a hamburger is paying taxes. Those taxes go to finance the state and to finance the military. well, you get the picture..... Egoism and hipocrisy are the name of the game.

There are a good many misconceptions here. For 30 years Dr. Paul has voted AGAINST every military adventure except granting the president the right to pursue the 911 terrorists. Dr. Paul is a gynecologist who does NOT accept Medicare and Medicaid money the government stole from someone else, preferring instead to offer personal credit, discounted or even free services. Dr. Paul, like most US Citizens, believes strongly in voluntary charity, but abhors theft at gun point in the name of charity. No citizenry has demonstrated a greater capacity for voluntary giving than those of the USA. Unlike most US politicians, Dr. Paul doesn't change his positions depending on who he's talking to. He is completely consistent whether his views are ridiculed or praised by socialists, Democrats or Republicans. A benefit of honesty is that you don't have to make up new positions depending on which way the wind blows. My personal opinion is that people who can justify theft as an ethical way to fulfill some noble goal, would also commit murder to achieve the same end. If you don't believe that the US government will kill you in order to take money you earned, but that it claims you owe, try to resist the IRS when it comes to confiscate your property for non-payment. If you forcefully defend your resistance, you will be summarily killed.