I plead guilty of negligence in writing anything more about Democrat proposals for health care.  That's because the Dems have been doing what amounts to a shell game with health care.  They've floated any number of plans, avoided putting their proposals into the form of actual legislation or alternatively, putting out such a massive proposal it was impossible to read and digest prior to voting.  All of this has conveyed the unmistakable message:  they don't want the public to know what they are up to.  One thing that is for sure,  all plans result in the eventual termination of private insurance, cost astronomical amounts of money, and create a brand new entitlement that will be impossible to revoke once it's shown we can't pay for it.

The health care industry in this country constitutes about 6% of the overall economy.  That makes health care a lynch-pin industry in the progressive march to create a fascist economy (and I don't mean 'fascist' in the WWII politically-charged definition, I mean it in the Mussolini government-corporate entity partnership in which government is the dominatrix and corporations the dominated).  Thus we see the sleight-of-hand tactics of Dem leadership, along with the arm-wrenching of resistant moderate Dems and piecrust promises to the one red-light district Republican.  Clearly, the Dem leadership is willing to gamble on future electability of those members who give it its majority today in order to get through this progressive agenda...out of concern for America's uninsured?  Hardly.

The heavy hand of progressive fascism is seen in the onerous penalties carried in the recently-passed health care bill, which can be described as "Lose a policy, go to jail".  Burdensome fees and fines ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 come complete with jail time ranging from 6 months to 5 years.  A "middle income" family of 4 must provide coverage that will cost no less than $15,000 per year --that's $1,250 a month in new costs! -- or else.  And how exactly does that work in a job-lacking, consumer-shy economic crisis?

It doesn't, of course.  It removes whatever disposable income might be left to middle income America and directs it into a "pool" to subsidize the nation's do-nothing population and its enabling alien worker population.  This is a sure means of prolonging our current economic crisis, and `a la Rahm Emanuel, this particular crisis is certainly not going to waste! 

We took a distinct jump to the left when social security was created in spite of FDR's initial declaration that "...this is the same old dole under another name.  It is almost [almost?  ALMOST??] dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980.  We can't do that.  We can't see the United States short in 1980 anymore than in 1935."  And yet he did, out of political expediency.  He hoped that many of the nation's older workers would retire and leave more jobs for younger workers; that was one way to lessen the unemployment figure quandary that dogged him till the nation's entry into WWII.  Truckin' along that left-hand road, LBJ picked up where Truman and JFK had failed before him, and in the name of JFK's memory, finally got Medicare/Medicaid passed in 1965.  Opposition to a government-run health care plan included the AMA, President Eisenhower (who did agree with Republican plans to subsidize private insurance companies to cover seniors), and Ronald Reagan, who was spokesman for the AMA in 1963.  Reagan organized Operation Coffee Cup, a grassroots plan that involved the wives of physicians who brought neighbors together to write letters, sign petitions, and integrate efforts with other organizations to block a government health plan, recognizing it to be "socialized medicine".  In a speech at the time, Reagan said "...behind it [government health insurance for seniors] will come other Federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.  Until one day, as Norman Thomas has said, we will awake to find we have socialism.  And if you don't do this and I don't do it [oppose the plan], one days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."  Prescient, no?

Progressive Dems continued to press for a nationalized health care system, but willingly targeting employers as being the primary providers of health insurance in the interim.  Yet another step toward the left involved Senator Ted Kennedy's passage of a 1973 bill mandating employers offer HMO coverage in addition to PPO plans.  As a result Kaiser, the main provider of HMO coverage, found itself surrounded by upstart HMOs, most of which failed financially over time and became consolidated into larger plans or disappeared entirely.  Dems at the time believed HMOs would be easier to evolve into a government provided plan in the future, once political power inured on their behalf.  It was an easy transition, they thought, to substitute government for administrator, delusionally believing management of costs without sacrifice to services provided was possible by both entities.  When it didn't work well on the private level, (by 2001 Kennedy was condemning denial of service by HMOs and advocating a single payer system) they decided it was because the scale of operation wasn't large enough, and a government plan was the only option.

Roosevelt considered but eventually discarded the idea of government-provided health insurance, favoring unemployment insurance and social security instead and confident the mercurial rise in union membership caused by his Wagner Act would grow employer-provided health insurance.  Truman, the first serious banger of the government health care drum, made several attempts to pass his plan.  "The greatest gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation's health...I have often and strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program.  The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles...".  Although Truman's call for an all-inclusive plan was rejected, a scaled down version covering only the elderly gained a bit in popularity, triggering the Republican response of subsidizing private insurance companies to do so (something Dems rejected; both parties historically opposed each other for no other reason than they were the opposition, something that is unchanged today).  JFK's approach was to liken government-provided senior health care insurance to social security, saying "We're not asking for anybody to hand this out, we are asking for a chance for the people who will receive the benefit to earn their way - the same principle established under the Social Security system in the 30s."  Except today we know that the system established in the 30s was a Ponzi scheme, that FDR's concerns about sloughing off a deficit to the future was real, and that Social Security will be running a deficit in just a couple of years from now.

When my grandmother died in 1972 my father received the final billing from her last hospital stay.  The cost was over $100,000, an amount that caused astonishment (over the cost) and gratitude (over the cost) that Medicare was picking up the tab.  My grandmother left no estate.  She lived her final years off social security and a military widow's pension from my grandfather because of his WWI service.  That final hospital bill would never have been paid, if not for the government.  So.  Is it any surprise that hospitals and their administration have not come out against the Obama administration's plans for government health care?

But what about doctors, who have been reduced in Medi/Medi reimbursement rates to the point that many of them no longer receive their expenses back?  What will happen to nurses' salaries, the hands-on lifesavers whose hourly rates are so much less than those of auto mechanics?  Why on earth are medical associations representing both groups supporting this nonsense?  How could the AMA have done such a 180 on this issue?  The answer is in numbers.  The AMA membership today is only about 17% of all doctors in the country, as opposed to over 96% in 1963 when Reagan represented them, and support by its leadership for regulation that is detrimental to the well-being of the membership is a big reason for this.  The same situation applies to nurses, who are represented by various unions who behave as most unions do now -- in support of progressive politics over the interests of members.  It has become a progressive tactic to infiltrate existing organizations, such as League of Women Voters, AMA, and AARP, take over the leadership, and then speak on behalf of a membership that simply does not agree.  (AARP's support of Obamacare is only surprising if one forgets that plans in Congress today call for abolishment of the Medicare Advantage plan, something AARP as the #2 provider of Medigap insurance will be only too happy to supply; that's income PLUS political power, an unbeatable enticement.)

In spite of evidence to the contrary at every step along the Leftist Way, progressive Democrats insist government is the only entity that can effectively run health care in this country. I can only conclude that this has nothing to do with a desire to make health care available to all Americans and everything to do with destroying a capitalistic economy.

Yet another Ponzi schemer bit the big one this past week.  Boca Raton investment advisor Michael Riolo told over 80 investors he was putting their money into foreign markets.  Instead, he used over $44 million to finance his lifestyle and to pay off earlier investors.  He's been sentenced to 24 years in Pen Fed.

This comes on the heels of Above-The-Fold big-timer Bernard Madoff, who is now in prison for the next 150 years of his life, whose scale of defrauding dwarfs that of Michael Riolo in the same way a gas giant planet dwarfs a comet.  But this is not the end of the Ponzi story.

Earlier this year  similar scenarios played out in Pennsylvania, Boston, and New York.  In another case, three men in south Florida have been charged by the SEC with defrauding Haitian-American investors to the tune of $14.7 million; this on the heels of a conviction last December of George Theodule, who scammed another $23 million from Haitian-Americans, as well.  On October 7 Michael Zelener of Tarzana, California, was sentenced to 2 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $2.6 million for bilking 200 investors in his version of the Ponzi scheme.  On the same day Gregory Bell, a hedge fund manager in Northbrook, Illinois, pled guilty to his role in another Ponzi scheme based out of Minnesota, in which businessman Tom Petters took investors' money allegedly to pay for bulk purchases of electronics goods to sell to "big box stores"; in reality, it was the tired "new investors' money to pay previous investors' returns" scheme.  A Weston, Pennsylvania man has been charged by the SEC in yet another Ponzi scheme involving $20 million and 50 investors; he was paying back investors he'd defrauded between 2003 and 2008 in order to finance his lavish lifestyle.  In yet another case, Edward P. May has been charged with defrauding investors in Detroit of over $200 million in ten years, as well as investment manager Frank Bluestein, who is charged with bringing May at least $74 million from over 800 investors.  Bluestein claims he believed it was a legitimate investment and had no idea May was defrauding everyone.  A Brighton, Michigan man, John Bravata, has been charged by the SEC with running a Ponzi scheme to the tune of $53 million. And last week Kevin Carney of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, was charged with defrauding over 300 investors of an unstated amount of money in his version of a Ponzi scheme -- one that purportedly used his own novel software to scoop Wall Street with a 3 minute delay and paid a hefty 20% guaranteed return.

In Monterey, California over 1500 investors anxiously await the outcome of bankruptcy proceedings and the newly-filed fraud charges against investment advisor David Nilsen and his sidekick Manoel Errico in the amount of $150 million of their hard-earned money.  Nilsen, a real estate broker and arranger of hard money loans for over 20 years, is accused of using the money to finance his lifestyle and to pay off earlier investors, with the help of Manoel Errico, who handled the paperwork end of the scheme.

This is the third time since 1985 that a fraudulent scheme of this nature has emerged on the Monterey Peninsula.  Each time the story is the same:  a broker who starts off legit, gains the confidence of wary investors, starts to live high on the hog off the success of the venture, begins to break laws to sustain the lifestyle (to the benefit and delight of family and personal friends), starts recruiting new investors on the strength of a good reputation in order to continue paying the previous ones, and eventually financial ruin results for all involved.  You'd think by now regulators, (in California that is often the Department of Real Estate; ultimately it usually involves the SEC) would know better by now and would have come up with some sort of safeguard for the public.  But noooooooo!

David Nilsen was investigated by the California DRE a year before his Ponzi scheme broke down.  Evidence of mishandling of trust funds and commingling of investor funds with his own was found.  Nilsen's broker's license was suspended, but instantly redeemed when he paid a fine.  The year that followed this action was the most costly for victims, as he stepped up his fraud to unprecedented levels, taking in over 1,000 new investors.  The DRE likes to claim responsibility for ending Nilsen's ruinous rampage, arguing that their monitoring of his business practices is what eventually brought his fraud to light and to an end.  But the truth is the failure of the DRE to stop Nilsen the previous year, or even to let his investors know of the action taken against him at the time, enabled his acceleration of fraud in the year that followed; and the exact same thing happened in both previous instances of fraud.  The problem?  The Department of Real Estate is a sort-of self-policing agency that operates to protect consumers without jeopardizing the industry overall.  That works, until there is a clash of purposes; then the consumer loses.

I knew victims of the 1986 defrauder, George Jercich.  One friend told me of his retired father, who had invested his entire savings with Mr. Jercich, attending every single court proceeding, hoping to understand how he'd been taken and praying he would recover something.  He never did.  He suffered a massive heart attack the day after all proceedings concluded.  George Jercich lost his real estate license, but my friend lost his father.  I have very good friends today, who will likely lose their home while waiting for some sort of resolution to David Nilsen's bankruptcy filing and his criminal case.  These people did their homework, personally inspecting each construction project brought to them for investment, meeting the contractor involved, demanding and receiving a filed deed of trust and note for every loan they participated in.  Their payment for doing due diligence is to be sued by the bankruptcy trustee, who wants to recover some of the money they were legitimately paid in fulfillment of the terms of their agreement with Nilsen so it can be "fairly" distributed to those who did not do their due diligence investigation.  This, too, is a trend. 

Irving Picard, the trustee representing victims of Madoff, has sued some investors who unwittingly brought victims to Madoff's scheme, in order to recover some of the profit paid to them by Madoff.  The SEC and California's Attorney General Jerry Brown (who never lets a good crisis go to waste!) have also sued on behalf of Madoff victims. And attorney Chapman and Associates out of Chicago are soliciting alleged victims of May and Bluestein, vowing to sue all beneficiaries of moneys paid in order to try to recover losses to victims, whether recipients knew of the fraud or not.  So, who are the victims again?

It is clear that Ponzi schemes in this country at this time are rampant.  This is demonstrating a few truths, among them:

1. Many, many Americans have had a lot of disposable income with which to invest in these schemes; unfortunately, many investors, including a lot of elderly investors, took equity from their homes to make these investments.
2. There has been, at least up till now, a great deal of belief in the financial stability and soundness of American finances on the part of these investors, who allowed this belief to subjugate prudent suspicion when it came to their own economic picture.  Congressional diddling with home mortgage laws undermined the stability of the home sales market, artificially twisted it into something unsustainable and foreign, and hands-on created the poison pill that manifested at the end of President Bush's term in office.  With the slide of the home mortgage market came the slide of the American economy.  This is not the first time we have seen this happen.  In the time following the stock market crash of 1929, when deflation arose, the exact same thing happened.  There was no secondary market for which banks might value and sell home mortgages, and when sales prices crashed and were redefined by foreclosure prices, the job market crashed along with it, creating the Great Depression that was sustained for a decade by an ignorant but passionate FDR.  Today, we have a secondary market that has been fatally manipulated by Congress so as to no longer function as it was intended and an equally ignorant but passionate president; there is no real difference between now and then.
   
3. There has been, especially in the elderly, little desire to rely on government to provide a satisfactory retirement standard of living.  No doubt media stories of the elderly eating cat food and having to chose between medications and food or housing have contributed to that, as well as dire warnings that the social security and Medicare systems are barreling into insolvency, with no remedial action being taken by elected representatives or government officials; no one seems purposed to fix the problems.  In fact, all that is being discussed and done by those who claim responsibility for saving the day is clearly perceived to be making things much worse.
   
4. There is an overall deficit in the system of checks and balances that has allowed so very many bottom feeders to pop up with these schemes undetected until it is way too late.  This is, I recognize, a form of market meeting demand, with susceptible victims providing the demand and unscrupulous schemers providing the market.  But in a nation where financial education is so absent from the schooling process, we are manufacturing victims with each and every high school graduation class; students who cannot recognize a balance statement, read a profit-and-loss report, understand revolving credit, or even balance a checkbook.  Note:  Replace "How can I be overdrawn when I still have checks in my checkbook?" with "How can my debit card be declined when I have $1,000 overdraft?"
5. If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't.

My friends urged me and my husband to join them in investing with David Nilsen.  We didn't, thank God.  While I couldn't cite any specific reason for them about David Nilsen, who had an upstanding reputation at that point, I did tell them I needed to be able to sleep at night.  At some level, I knew there was something wrong with investments that paid a return so much higher than the norm.

So.  Prime rate manipulation.  Stimulus spending.  So-called "green" industry.  Bank bailout and bank failure. Government ownership of private companies.  "Jobless recovery."  Can anyone sleep at night?

Now there's concern that nursing homes will have to close their doors in massive numbers because funds to them have been cut to the point of insolvency. (Link:   www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/05/funding-cuts-threaten-nursing-homes/?test=latestnews) Now?  Why is this a surprise?  This is exactly what liberals have been trying to bring about for years!

Called "a perfect storm" of scheduled Medi/Medi cuts at both state and federal levels, combined with a lousy economy that, counter to propaganda, is not recovering, experts have only just now recognized that we will find ourselves in deep kimshee if suddenly Grandma and Grandpa have to come home because there is no place else to go.

Or is there?  Those facilities will still be there.  The employees will still be there.  The only thing that might not be there is...

...the owner.  The creator.  The entrepreneuer.  The one who took the initial risks.  The one who saw the need and filled it.  The business operator who made the facility in the first place.

Liberals/progressives have been convinced for a long time now that no one should make a profit from health care services.  That is the basis to everything we've seen from them, starting with the implementation of Social Security by FDR (who intended to tackle health care next but was distracted by a war), Medicare and Medicaid under LBJ, to the changes proposed by Hillarycare as well as the changes actually implemented under the radar under President Clinton's regime, and to both the 'public option' and 'reform' plans being debated right now in Congress (as well as those plans not being debated, but on the table nonetheless).  First intended for the chopping block was privately owned long term care facilities. 

Most of the American population today does not remember a time when there was no Medicare or Medicaid, but in reality it hasn't been all that long.  What did people do with Grandma and Grandpa before Medi/Medi?  They brought them home to live with the family or they were cared for by charities.  When one views other LBJ programs, such has his massive welfare program that ended the need for low income level fathers, one sees that Medi/Medi is yet another destructive blow to the family structure that was the basis of the strength of this country since its founding days. 

For most of the public, specific details of Hillarycare remain shrouded under the same secrecy with which it was created.  Compared to what is on the table today, however, it was a relatively minor step on the Road To Government Healthcare.  It called for "universal coverage" that really meant a mandate for employers to cover all employees, and for government-dominated HMOs to provide coverage for everyone else, with government subsidies covering the costs in a Medi/Medi manner.  In 2007 Mrs. Clinton revised her health care proposals to something that sounds suspiciously just like the health care proposals being promoted by Democrats right now, including a mandate that everyone be covered.   

When HillaryCare collapsed under the deluge of Democrat alternatives and a court case focused on its secret origins, the Clinton administration continued to put into place changes that took aim at the owners of long term care facilities.  An extremely complex computerized billing system was initiated, one that required patient medical data as part of the billing and that made continuous comparisons of patient medical data between facilities, regions, and states.  Any so-called deviation, ranging from input error to patient weight loss was identified as "fraud".  No longer was the HHS Inspector General in charge of investigating possible fraud, referring actual fraud cases to the Department of Justice; that responsibility was given over directly to Janet Reno's department for investigation by the FBI.  There was no such thing as an error.  Period.  It was, and is, all 'fraud'.      

In California monitoring of long term care facilities is a function of the Department of Health Services (DHS).  Part of that monitoring, in compliance with federal regulations, is an inspection of each facility, called a survey, every two years.  Among the inspectors who conduct surveys are those who are notorious for espousing their belief that government should own and operate all facilities; these inspectors are also notorious for finding the most 'violations', especially severe ones with huge monetary penalties, forcing facility owners to pay large sums of money in their own defense during an appeal process or in fines because it is less costly.  These people believe they are hitting the profits of the owners when they do this, but in reality there has been so very little profit left that what happens is facilities have had to do more with less a long, long time now.  It is the patients who are deprived, who suffer.  Owners are already stretched too thin.  Of course, this is exactly the situation that contributes to violations.

The health care debate that has garnered so much attention under the Obama regime must be viewed as the next step in a process begun a long, long time ago.  The goal championed by liberals/progressives for a healthy America is cushioned in their steadfast belief that the state should be in control of All Things People.  But, to paraphrase a popular saying of the sixties, government control is not healthy for children and other living things.

Know this as fact:  Emergency rooms and doctors' offices around the country never stopped treating patients for flu this year.  Normally flu vanishes as a chief complaint when warm weather envelopes the nation, but this year clinics, offices, and ERs received a steady flow of patients with flu symptoms continually throughout the summer.

But this is also true:  Patients treated for flu symptoms generally were NOT tested to see if they had the H1N1 strain of flu.  Tests to confirm the presence of the organism are expensive.  Instead, medical practitioners presumed the presence of H1N1 because symptoms appeared in patients in the "off season".  In many, many instances, hundreds of presumed cases have contributed to the worldwide toll being kept by WHO and in this country by the CDC.  Only when symptoms required hospitalization was testing done to confirm the organism, and even then this was not done consistently.

So.  Do we have an epidemic, a pandemic, or not?  The truth is, nobody knows for certain.

Another fact:  This summer was one of the coolest on record for many parts of this country.  Flu organisms flourish in cold, damp weather when immune systems are somewhat compromised by lowering of body temperatures.  Just a wee bit of decrease enables many flu organisms to overcome the body's defenses and to flourish.  Was this a contributing factor to the unusual continuous flu season this year?  Once again, nobody knows for certain.

Although the very few deaths in this country that have resulted from H1N1 flu (and yes, once someone dies from flu, they definitely test for the virus) have occurred in people with compromised immune systems because of other serious health conditions, the initial fear is that the virus will mutate into something far more virulent and deadly, just as the flu epidemic of 1918 did.  THAT is the real concern, NOT the current form of H1N1.

So.  This immunization that's been rushed to market.  Is it safe?  Is it necessary?  Once again, nobody knows for certain.  But looking at the track record of the 1918 pandemic, by the time you discover you should have had the immunization, it's too late.  In 1918 the so-called "Spanish flu" affected a number of people in the spring and into the summer, the "off-season".  Very few people suffered more than 3 days from this version of the virus, and almost all recovered.  But by autumn the virus had mutated.  Over 25% of the nation's population had the flu.  It killed approximately 50 million people worldwide, and in one year the average life expectancy in this country dropped by 12 years because of it.

I really hate it when health officials, from private doctors to representatives of the CDC, buy into scare tactics and champion a pandemic that simply has not been factually verified.  The LAST thing we need out of people we want to trust is manipulation without basis and scare tactics.  In this case, all they had to do was mandate confirmatory testing whenever health care practitioners diagnosed off-season flu in order to determine if it really was H1N1 virus.  Cost, unfortunately, was prohibitive, or so we're told.  That leaves me with this sinking suspicion that there are other irons in this fire.

What would the nation's 'vast' uninsureds do in the face of a deadly epidemic?  Where would they get health care to save their lives if there is not a public plan in place?  Isn't this upcoming, seemingly guaranteed pandemic compelling evidence we need to adopt the President's plan, however nebulous it may be, for health care?  Uh huh.

What if we had a pandemic and nobody participated?  Yes, that's a play on words for that wonderful sentiment of the 60s, "What if there was a war and nobody came?"  The government has put a lot of time, effort and of course, money into developing an immunization to combat this possibly upcoming pandemic.  New York is the first state to tell its health care workers it is mandatory they be immunized or they will lose their jobs, but they are rebelling in droves.

I am not here to tell you yes, you should immunize or no, you should not immunize.  That is a decision you must make for yourselves, preferably with the advice of your doctor.  But make sure you ask your doctor ALL the questions, because far too many of them have been content to let the CDC, the WHO, and the Obama administration's HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius do their thinking for them.  Besides, there is matter of runaway malpractice lawsuits...

FBI Arrests Jordanian For Downtown Dallas Bomb Plot...(Hosam Maher Husein Smahdi)
Illinois Man Charged In Plot To Bomb Federal Offices...  (Talib Islam)
Terror Suspects Accused of Targeting Marine Base At Quantico...(Daniel Patrick Boyd, Hysen Sherifi)
Men Vanish After Taking Photos Of Philly Subway System...

Oh dear God.

They're scenting weakness and they're back, with a vengeance they haven't before shown.

Then there's this one:

Link:  www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54514

"Administration Will Cut Border Patrol Deployed on US-Mexico Border

"Even though the Border Patrol now reports that almost 1,300 miles of the US-Mexican border is not under effective control, and the Department of Justice says that vast stretches of it are "easily breached", and the GAO Accountability Office has revealed that three persons "linked to terrorism" and 530 aliens from "special interest countries" were intercepted at Border Patrol checkpoints last year, the administration is nonetheless now planning to decrease the number of border patrol agents deployed on the US-Mexico border..."

The US Department of Homeland Security has reported that the Border Patrol will relocate 384 agents to the US-Canada border in what can be called nothing more than a shell game.  The southern border is 1,954 miles long, only 697 miles of which are called "under effective control".  The US-Canadian border has a shocking 32 miles under effective control, and the coastal sectors of the country have the remaining 165 miles under effective control.  The goal, the administration has said, is to keep the number of miles under effective control and not allow any loss. 

What about gaining on it, for heaven's sake???  "The intention is to take back the border incrementally, and make gains we can keep," a Border Patrol spokesman said.  "We do not intend...to give back miles we have gained control over."

Oh good.  That makes me feel so much better.  NOT!

In the days following the attacks of September 22, 2001 there were numerous reports of foreign-looking men, almost always wearing white shirts and dark slacks, filming military installations, water systems, chemical and nuclear plants, and transportation systems.  I spotted one such man myself, filming away outside the gated entrance and guard shack at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey.  Surprisingly, no one knew who to tell or what to do about it when I called the Monterey PD, it being nighttime and phones at the NPGS being forwarded to answering machines, but they assured me they'd figure something out in a hurry.  No follow-up attack took place there, but the beautiful grounds became off-limits to the non-military public for a long time, and that was a real loss to the community. (The NPGS is located on the former grounds of the famous Del Monte Hotel; it's simply stunning to see, and the Navy has a long tradition of being quite generous in allowing use of many of its buildings for community events.)

I've been afraid for my country these past 9 months.  I've feared the loss of the foundations of liberty as the growth of government has exploded.  But now I'm trembling for myself, my loved ones, and the innocents who believe, who expect they will be kept safe by this Big Daddy Government.  I am afraid of the change I see coming at us now, and I hope I'm wrong...

I have known for a long time now that Democrats do not win elections; Republicans lose them.  I know that this was never more true than in 2008, when Republicans argued over their candidate, Senator John McCain:  was he conservative enough, was he too conservative?  Each voter answered that question to his or her own satisfaction and either voted for or against Senator McCain and Governor Palin, or stayed home in silent protest over the selection offered by the party.  And so, we got the Obama administration, along with its disastrous agenda.

It has never been more imperative that we figure out what happened in our party in 2008 and address it before the 2010 elections take place.  The very survival of our country and form of government is at stake if we do not put a straitjacket on the classical fascist actions of this administration.  The only way to do so is to eliminate the power of the Pelosi House and the Reid Senate.  To understand what we did in 2008 we need to look back in history, because the contentious discord we've experienced and continue to experience is not new; nor is its solution.  Disputes originate in the differences between traditionalist and libertarian conservatives, and the solution lies in the shared tenets of fusionist conservatives.

In the 1950s few debates rang louder in America than that between conservatives.  It was an issue that had Russell Kirk calling libertarians (then referred to as "individualists") such as Frank Meyer "anti-Christian" and "social atomism", claiming individualism was the road to anarchy.  Meyer responded that traditionalists such as Russell did not comprehend the ideas and institutions of a free society, and that they lacked a "clear and distinct principle".  Friedrich Hayek, the economist and self-proclaimed libertarian, jumped into the fray and wrote a provocative essay entitled "Why I Am Not A Conservative".  In it he wrote that what was wrong  with conservatism was practically everything:  it does not understand economic forces, mistrusts anything new, and is comfortable using the power of government to prevent change, and lacking any basic principle, hopes that the "wise and good will rule".  Whittaker Chambers, a traditionalist, wrote a scathing review of libertarian Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and Ayn Rand responded that National Review was "the worst and most dangerous magazine in America".

Recognizing value from both factions, Frank Meyer brought together several leading conservatives at the time and asked them to write on "What Is A Conservative?".  He then looked for commonalities in the writings of Hayek, Kirk, William F. Buckley, and others, and found that conservatives of all sorts shared these ideals:

1. They agree there should be "an objective moral order" of "immutable standards by which human conduct should be judged";
2. They value "the human person" as the main target and beneficiary of political and social thought;
3. They oppose use of the State "to enforce ideological patterns on human beings";
4. They reject necessary centralized power and authority required for a planned society;
5. They support the Constitution, as it was "originally conceived" (remember that much interpretation of the Constitution had changed abruptly and dramatically starting with FDR and Chief Justice Hugo Black's Supreme Court, favoring a strong centralized federal government for the first time).
   
6. They acknowledged and supported Western civilization as the necessary basis for a free society, and the need to defend it against the totalitarianism of communism.

Out of this study, Frank Meyer concluded that conservatism was "reason operating within tradition", the basis of fusionism.  M. Stanton Evans, also a fusionist, has pointed out that the same sort of conclusion was arrived at by our Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention, when the traditionalist/authoritarian ideas of Hamilton and the libertarian/classical liberal ideas of Jefferson were rejected in favor of the fusionist ideas of Madison, who wrote in The Federalist that in designing a system of government where men will govern men "the great difficulty lies in this:  You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself".  Their solution was to not trust in the goodness of man, but to create a system of checks and balances to limit the authority of any man who might govern.

The next to pick up the fusionist mantle was Senator Barry Goldwater, who outlined his ideas in his The Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960.  Ironically it was ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell, a traditionalist, who nonetheless found common ground with Goldwater on minimal government, support of the Constitution, and recognition of the dangers of communism.  Goldwater wrote that each person is unique and therefore provision must be made for the development of differing abilities, that neither the economic nor the spiritual aspect of man can be free if the other is not, and that man's spiritual and economic development must be self-directed, not through outside sources.  Goldwater's description of man as a spiritual being as well as an economic one captured the minds of America, including one Ronald Reagan.  Reagan won his own landslide with the votes of conservatives from both parties because of the appeal of his fusionist conservatism.  Remember that "Big Tent" he spoke of?

Conservatives still recognize the need for the Constitution as written, as opposed to the "living document" promoted by Hugo Black's court in support of FDR's trial-and-error government.  We still want minimal government, even more so today, when we are drowning in debt, taxes, and out-of-control irrational laws and rules.  And we still see the threat of totalitarianism, whether it comes from the communism of a Putin-controlled Russia, a fanatical Islamafascist bunch of clerics, or an Obama administration hellbent on reorganizing our government into something decidedly more socialistic and fascist.  We need to recognize the fusionist principles that unite us in order to stop this runaway administration in 2010.  We need to put fiscal adults into the governors' mansions across the country.  And we need to remove the unfounded charges against conservatives of bigotry and selfishness from political lexicon in this country, once and for all.  It's critical!

I don't like to mince words.  An illegal alien is an illegal alien, and use of such terms as "undocumented worker" is as purposely misleading as it can be inaccurate.  Today my stance towards more perfect speech is supported by none other than UCLA School of Law's Professor Eugene Volokh, whom I admire greatly.  Says Professor Volokh:



YEAH!

HR 3200:  It's not gone yet.  *sigh*

It's almost impossible to read the 1017 pages of this bill without nodding off repeatedly; Congressman Conyers was clearly speaking with this bill in mind when he complained about having to vote in two days on bills over 1,000 pages long and needing two lawyers to interpret.  It does help to know that this magnum opus constitutes the synthesis of Congressman Henry Waxman's decades-long efforts to take health care out of the private sector and deliver it, once and for all, firmly into the grasp of government.  It represents his final abandonment of mandated employer-provided health care coverage, something begun by unions in the post-WWII era, picked up by politicians starting with the Nixon administration and every successive administration since, and something Waxman championed throughout the 1980s.  A 1988 Issue Brief prepared by the Congressional Research Service identifies the number of uninsured as being either 25 million or 37 million, depending on which study you believe, which coincides entirely with the 47 million (less 12 million illegal aliens) being touted today.  In the document, pending bills regarding health care coverage are listed, including a Kennedy/Waxman bill that mandates employers to pick up 80% - 100% of health insurance premiums for their employees; a bill by Congressman Pete Stark taxes employers who do not provide insurance to their employees, establishes a tax credit for payment of premiums, and creates federal and state insurance pools (today's so-called Exchanges); finally, a Jenkins/Chafe bill denies tax credits to any employer-provided insurance plan that does not provide "dollar-first" payment for child health care -- a term in use today meaning insurance covers payment for well-baby coverage, not the parent.

The bill is comprehensive in its establishment of a brand new bureaucracy within the federal government, something that is needed because of its creation of health care coverage for many not currently covered, the so-called "public plan".  It is stop-gap in its changes proposed to Medicare and Medicaid billing and provider mandate methods.  And it is premature, as evidenced by the incredible number of pilot programs that will be funded under it.

Much has already been said about certain distasteful provisions in the bill, and I won't waste a lot of time repeating them, but I do want to clarify a couple of inflammatory points:

1. Nothing in the bill flatly calls for or prohibits abortion coverage.  Issues of coverage beyond the mandatory general categories listed as part of the Essential Benefits Plan are left to the Health Benefits Advisory Committee, which has already been created under the Stimulus Bill.
   
2. Nothing in the bill prohibits coverage from being extended to illegal aliens; however, there is language that prohibits extending health care tax 'credits' to illegal aliens, but explicitly exempts them from the requirement to pay a tax for failure to have insurance.
3. It increases funding to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the tune of $100,000,000 in order to decrease waste, fraud, and abuse without presenting any plan or mechanism for doing so.  Ironic, that, eh?
4. It mandates creation of and exclusive use of electronic patient records and "Electronic Administrative Transactions", this in spite of the theft of tens of thousands of veterans' records when the VA went to such a system, and in spite of thousands of children in Florida recently being denied health care services because of a computer glitch.  No adequate protection exists today that can 100% safeguard against hacking of electronic networks.  Period
   
5. It mandates creation of a new Trust Fund, to be funded by both taxes paid within the system and automatic appropriations from the US Treasury General Fund to replace non-reimbursed funds spent.
6. The volume of mandatory reporting, penalties, excise taxes, reserves, and coverage mandates that will apply to existing private insurance plans guarantee their necessary end in the not-too-far future, beginning with self-insuring employers who pay their employees' bills in lieu of buying insurance from an insurance company.  No changes to existing policy coverage is allowed, with the exception of adding new dependents; changes automatically cause the employer to have to provide the public plan.

The bill creates the position of Health Choices Commissioner, who is empowered to set rates, establish standards for networks in private plans, set the "Medical Loss Ratio" (MLR) for private plans at the "highest ratio possible" (which means limit the amount of profit insurers can make), establish marketing standards, define terms like "employee" "part-time" and "full-time" even though they are already defined under labor laws and the IRC, manipulate private and public plan premium amounts to control 'adverse selection' (having a bunch of costly patients all choose the same plan, loading it up) among enrollees, make from and receive payments into the Trust Fund, audit all insurers and charge them for the audits, gather confidential information and data from all insurers, issue reports to Congress such as one comparing self-insured and subscriber plans in areas of capital reserves with emphasis on the form of ownership (whether corporate or not), risk, and effects of rating rules (but being prohibited from making recommendations for changes that might increase the number of self-insurers), and terminate or take over state Exchanges.  The Health and Human Services Secretary is responsible for creating and administering the public plan, but the Health Choices Commissioner is responsible for administrating the federal insurance Exchange (a group of qualifying plans offered to the public, including the public plan).

The bill defines who appoints whom to the Health Benefits Advisory Committee, chaired by the Surgeon General.  The President appoints 9 non-federal employee members and either 2, 4, 6, or 8 members who are federal employees or officers, all for 3 year terms.  The Comptroller General appoints 9 additional members.  Members are supposed to include providers, consumers, employers, insurers, experts in health care finance and delivery, experts in racial and ethnic disparities, experts in disabilities, government agencies, at least one doctor or health care professional, and one expert on children's health care for balance.  These are the folks who will decide what is covered or not covered in the public plan.

A great deal of the plan involves changes in policies pertaining to Medicaid and Medicare, mostly involving what can be charged and how it can be charged, and how providers will be mandated to provide more services for less money, including the ever-popular "bundling of services" technique that requires a doctor or other care provider to receive a flat fee for providing complete care to a patient.  For example, a neonatal cardiac surgeon is reimbursed $2900 in Missouri for performing open heart surgery on an infant, and that covers all pre-op visits, the surgery, post-op medications, visits, procedures, and treatments for 30 days after the surgery. Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) dollars, which are distributed to hospitals to offset their costs for non-reimbursable treatment of patients, will be phased out and eliminated because, theoretically, those costs should diminish and go away once everyone is insured.

Pilot programs, funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, include Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a sort of small-time HMO done at the doctor level (approximately 5,000 Medicare patients and/or 15,000 private insurance patients per ACO); one to bundle Post Acute Care by skilled nursing facilities, in-patient rehab center, long term care facilities and the like; one to convert emergency care to a single episode via bundling -- meaning, doing away with paying for readmissions within days of discharge, even though it is Medicare/Medicaid who dictates when that discharge will happen, NOT the doctor; grants for language services where needed, along with the mandate that "entities (providers) must provide for culturally and linguistically appropriate communication and health services" (none of which is defined), a Medical Home pilot program, and a host of others too numerous to continue mentioning.

The last part of the bill is dedicated to housekeeping; changing language in pre-existing programs and laws to incorporate them into this new bureaucracy, and it fleshes out the system by creating funding for such things as birthing centers that are separate from hospitals (cross your fingers, Mom!), family planning services to non-pregnant low income women (not couples), Medicare funding for smoking cessation, nurse home visits to low income pregnant women and to children under the age of two to prevent abuse and neglect, public health clinics to provide children's vaccinations, rebates to states who pay for graduate medical student schooling, and funding of the Health Care Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund to the tune of $670 million between 2010 and 2013, and $375 million each year thereafter, purpose unstated and unclear.  It increases the amount of money paid to doctors who become licensed via the National Health Service Corps from $35,000 to $50,000 but doubles the amount of mandatory service time and reduces credit for assigned service to half -- a sort of indenture to government.  It increases a stipend paid to civilian employees and officers in the regular or reserve corps working in the Public Health Work Force Corps to $1269 per month, in addition to their educational scholarship and increases their service period to 2 years.  And on.  And on.

There is a one-time $10 million payout, called "reinsurance" in the bill, to be paid to retirees and spouses not yet Medicare-eligible to reimburse 80% of their out-of-pocket costs between $15,000 and $90,000.  This money is paid directly to the retiree/spouse and NOT to the employer who provided the coverage.  This money goes into a separate trust fund.  There is no mechanism for sustaining the trust fund.  Rumor is that this is payback money for union retirees who tend to retire much earlier than the rest of us, thus making them not yet Medicare-eligible.  There is nothing in the bill to substantiate or deny that charge, however.

When one adds up the numbers spelled out in HS 3200, one quickly leaves earth for the ionosphere, keeping in mind that numbers are only spelled out as far ahead as 2019, but usually not beyond 2013.  The $88 billion figure that is thrown about by news commentators who prove by doing so that they never read the bill is just not supported; it is far too low.  And the only identified mechanisms for compensating for lack of money in the program is to automatically take from the US Treasury's General Fund; read: increase taxes, or raise premiums. But raising premiums is what private insurers have had to do.  Where's the improvement?

In my next installment I will cover some of the points of other health care bills that are up for consideration today, including Senator Baucas' Bipartisan Six non-bill, the Affordable Health Choices Act (Kennedy/Dodd), the self-identified "Tuesday Group" Patient's Choice Act of 2009, and some plans in place now in such states as Massachusetts, Florida, and West Virginia. 

On September 24, 2009 President Obama will displace his own duly appointed representative to the United Nations Security Council, Permanent Representative Susan Rice.  In her stead, he will chair the monthly meeting of the UN Security Council, something no other US President has ever done.

In his role as presiding Chair of the Security Council, Mr. Obama will be empowered to set the topic of the meeting.  He has chosen to discuss nuclear nonproliferation, a topic that covers current actions before the UN, and nuclear disarmament, a topic that does NOT have current action before the UN.  Susan Rice has said that it is not the president's intention to point fingers or name names, so this will be a kumbaya/group hug treatment of two very serious issues by an overly visible president.  Far be it from our Fearless Leader's agenda to actually discuss antagonistic and aggressive actions taken by Iran or North Korea in the Security Council, whose chartered purpose is maintenance of international peace and security, and who is empowered to wield international sanctions and to authorize military action in pursuit of that purpose.  Instead of dealing with Iran and North Korea items formerly on the agenda, the president's goal is to arrive at a statement at the conclusion of the session that all in attendance are expected to sign onto:  We promise to support the idea of nuclear nonproliferation.

In attendance at this meeting will be representatives of the permanent member states, USA, UK, China, Russia, and France, and from ten elected member states, Turkey Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica, Croatia, Vietnam, Austria, Burkina Faso, Uganda...and oh yeah, Libya.  Colonel Quaddafi is slated to address the General Assembly and may  attend the Security Council meeting as well.

Excuse me, but I thought we were p.o'd at Libya right now for the shenanigans over that Lockerbie Bomber dude, aren't we?

Not content with a scheduled address to the General Assembly (something last done by President George W. Bush), President Obama has claimed his Right of Kings and is making the unprecedented move to Chair the UN Security Council.  But why?  It doesn't take much imagination to see the Middle Eastern representatives laughing into their sleeves as the American president tells them how much things have changed since he's taken over, and how hope for a better future will get them all where they want to go, together.

Mr. President, would you please get back to your Oval Office and start behaving like the CEO for our country instead of the hired entertainment?  Please?  Serve and protect, man!  Leave the diplomacy stuff to the diplomats.

I am sick to death of otherwise intelligent people wondering why kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard didn't ask someone for help when she had contact with others, sometimes unsupervised, as she worked in her captor's printing business.  And some of the really stupid have concluded "She must have thought she loved him -- some sort of  Stockholm Syndrome maybe."

Think, people THINK!

You are an 11 year old girl, just on the cusp of puberty, perhaps with a first puppy love crush on a school mate.  You are waiting for the school bus to come, secure, you think, under the watchful eye of your stepdad.  You are wearing your favorite color, pink.  The sun is shining, birds are singing, and all is well with the world.

Suddenly, a car pulls up, you are grabbed, roughly dragged into its foul interior, and the entire world as you knew it vanishes.  Instantly your life becomes one of abuse, harsh tones, threats, deprivation.  You are slapped and beaten by a crazy old man and his sycophant wife, subjected to unthinkable pain and humiliation as That Man gets on you, in you.  Your tears do not bring your stepdad to save you or your mother to hold you in her arms and comfort you.  And after a while, you begin to realize that your life before was the dream; this nightmare is reality.

After three years of unremitting unending unabated abuse, you no longer cry.  You no longer think about your mother because it is too hurtful.  You no longer even ask a mute God "Why?" because there is no answer.  You hate the color pink.  Jaycee Lee Dugard is dead and Allissa has risen from her ashes.  But you have other concerns now.  You've given birth, at this place now called "home", with only Them to help you.  You felt pain like nothing else in your life, not even when That Man raped you the first time, and the times after and after and after.  You were so scared when the baby came, and you thought you were going to die, but you didn't.  There is now a baby girl, sweet and innocent, who will call you "Mother" someday, who needs to be protected like you were not from these evil beings.  And just to show their power, the first thing they do is take her from your arms.  That Man cradles her, tears in his own eyes, and you cringe, inside, so they won't punish you again.  And you vow to do whatever you have to do to protect her from That Man.

You pretend to be happy with Them.  You act like you are happy to be part of their idea of 'family', twisted and distorted as you know it to be because you remember your own family.  You keep up your part of the bargain with That Devil, who told you all those years ago that if you would behave, cooperate, not try to run away that he would not kill your family.  (You believe his threat; you've heard him and his hateful wife arguing about the risks he's taken with the 'harlots' he's killed.  He's even shown you places in the back yard and in next door's back yard where he buried a couple of them, always with that leering smile and threat in his eyes.) He kept up his end of the bargain, and you intend to keep up yours.  You go along to get along.  You smile and act cheerful.  Some of that, the part that is due to your daughter, is not acting.  You pretend to welcome That Man and his evil intentions to your tent in the hopes he will be satisfied with you and stay away from your daughter.  And after a long, long while, you are eighteen and there is another little baby girl to protect.

You fool them enough to be allowed to work in their printing business.  There are times when you seem to be alone with customers, or to be on the phone with them, but you know That Man better than that.  You know his power, his evil.  You've seen some of his customers wearing that box, the one through which he claims God speaks to him.  You cannot tell when a customer is sent there by Them to test you.  You think if you fail any test you will be eliminated as easily as the harlots are, and no one will be there to protect your girls.  So you do nothing to jeopardize their safety, and they believe they own you.  So when That Man tells his wife to bring you to the parole officer's office, he is confident you are with him and will not betray him.  And you see your chance...

Poor, sweet Jaycee!  Were you really picked at random?  Were you named the wrong name, baby girl?  Did  your name play into That Monster's delusional system?  Or were you just too pretty in pink for him to pass up?

She is not the only victim here.  Her stepfather was long suspected of harming her, he who tried to save her but couldn't.  Her mother has lived in doubt of the man she loved, feeling ache in her heart and longing in her arms for her daughter.  Her sister has lived under her shadow, overprotected by parents who fear her loss as well.  And there are two young girls who now know that they are the product of an evil man's crimes against their mother, a man they know as 'Father'.

Our California state legislature, aided and abetted by incompetent governors and an indifferent electorate for a long, long time now, have put this state into an economic mess the likes of which have never before been seen, and they don't have a freaking clue what to do to fix it.  Instead of ridding our jails of illegal aliens, who should be in federal penitentiaries on their own countries' dimes serving out sentences while awaiting deporture, our elected screw-ups are debating how many criminals they ought to return to the streets, how many Monsters to inflict on the public once again.  We are Jaycees in the making, and it's our government that is the Monster.

I'm looking for something a bit different in a bumper sticker.

There is a section of Pacific Coast Highway that runs through Newport Beach that is called "Mariner's Mile".  It's a bit longer than a mile, and in days past the businesses located along it were marine-related in some manner; i.e., waterfront restaurants, boat sales and services, chandleries, etc.  A very ambitious developer spent the better part of the last few years buying up contiguous properties on the southeast part of Mariner's Mile, getting approvals to construct a sort of themed 'village'.  The businesses located on these properties relocated or closed and the land was fenced off.  At some point during the banking crisis and the real estate nose dive the developer changed its collective mind.  For Sale signs have appeared on the properties, offering them for sale individually or collectively.  What was once a thriving, exciting commercial district is now home to chain links and vacancies.

This part of Newport Beach was home to John Wayne (known as "Duke" to his friends) for decades.  His home was located on a point overlooking Newport Harbor.  Many of these former businesses were patronized by him, his family, and his numerous Hollywood visitors (including close friend Ronald Reagan).  When the For Sale signs appeared on these properties, someone posted bright yellow circular bumper stickers on each property that said simply "I Miss Duke".  Indeed!

'Dutch' was Ronald Reagan's nickname, given to him by his father, something I learned when I visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.  On my last visit I was there to hear Condoleeza Rice give a talk, to have dinner, and to browse the Library with a young friend who had never been there.  It was an exhilarating day and evening all around, all the more so because when my young friend and I discussed political issues, I discovered that ethics are firmly in place with her generation, and sensibility is in charge with her.

It is not possible to stroll through the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library without coming away inspired, with a sense of purpose, with the knowledge that all those things one has been thinking and all those feelings one has been having ARE worth standing up for and ARE valid.  This time around I focused on the period of time when Reagan was President of the Screen Actors Guild and he was called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Reagan represented a large number of people who were divided over the question of subversion via film-making: some believed he had no business casting aspersions on anyone making a film, regardless of their ulterior motive, because a film constituted employment for the members; others believed the antics of subversives were wrong and should be stopped.  Reagan wrote about his Guild's attempts to arbitrate between a warring union and producers for months and months, finally recognizing that the union members had no intention of resolving issues because the chaos of a strike threat was their real goal.  Reagan lost a wife over this conflict*.  Jane Wyman did not agree with him taking the position he did, nor the things he had to say, and eventually they divorced.  It cost him personally to do what he thought was the right thing, but he still did it.  Now, juxtapose his actions against those of most of our elected officials today.  There's simply no comparison, is there?

I want a bumper sticker that says "I Miss Duke and Dutch".  I miss the ethics these two men presented to the world.  The conflicts we struggle with today are not different than the ones they took on, perpetuated by the same ideologues with whom they wrestled.  But while those Anti-Americans continue to masquerade as patriots, ever-devoted to strangling those same freedoms that allow them to persist, gaining in strength and influence, what has been happening to counter them?  Not much.

We stumble over our variations, we inject our preconditions, and we fail to rally America.  Religion, abortion, sexuality, and so many other issues all take precedence over the basic, driving question of the role of the federal government in the lives of its citizens.  FIRST we limit the federal government, THEN we tackle the rest at the state level, where these questions properly and Constitutionally belong and where they are manageable.  It simply does not work in the reverse.

* I do not wish to imply that this was the sole issue over which the Wyman-Reagan marriage dissolved.  There were much more important problems, including the death of a child, that contributed to the end of the marriage.  This was only one minor issue in the overall scheme of things.

Say the name 'Ted Kennedy' and by far the most common association that will come to mind is "Chappaquiddick".   That is because although the Senator was involved in too many legislative issues to easily name over the years he graced the halls of the Senate, none of his pieces of legislation rise to a level sufficient to blot out that name, nor that of Mary Jo Kopechne.

But one thing definitely should have registered with the American public, and that was a letter that emerged in the 1990s, after the fall of the USSR, when Soviet records became available to those curious enough to ask and well-funded enough to receive.  It was discovered by a Times of London reporter and went virtually unnoticed until Dr. Paul Kengor, a professor of political science, writer of books about conservative presidents and frequent contributor to such conservative publications as Townhall, American Thinker, and National Review, included it in his book, "The Crusader -- Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism".

Here is the text of a letter written by a KGB official in 1983, discussing contact made by Senator Kennedy and detailing the Senator's plans, in violation of all confidences and of federal law:

Special Importance
Committee on State Security of the USSR
14.05. 1983 No. 1029 Ch/OV
Moscow

Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Comrade Y.V. Andropov

Comrade Y.V. Andropov

On 9-10 May of this year, Senator Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant J. Tunney was in Moscow. The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Center Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.

Senator Kennedy, like other rational people, is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations. Events are developing such that this relationship coupled with the general state of global affairs will make the situation even more dangerous. The main reason for this is Reagan’s belligerence, and his firm commitment to deploy new American middle range nuclear weapons within Western Europe.

According to Kennedy, the current threat is due to the President’s refusal to engage any modification on his politics. He feels that his domestic standing has been strengthened because of the well publicized improvement of the economy: inflation has been greatly reduced, production levels are increasing as is overall business activity. For these reasons, interest rates will continue to decline. The White House has portrayed this in the media as the “success of Reaganomics.”

Naturally, not everything in the province of economics has gone according to Reagan’s plan. A few well known economists and members of financial circles, particularly from the north-eastern states, foresee certain hidden tendencies that many bring about a new economic crisis in the USA. This could bring about the fall of the presidential campaign of 1984, which would benefit the Democratic party. Nevertheless, there are no secure assurances this will indeed develop.

The only real threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations. These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign. The movement advocating a freeze on nuclear arsenals of both countries continues to gain strength in the United States. The movement is also willing to accept preparations, particularly from Kennedy, for its continued growth. In political and influential circles of the country, including within Congress, the resistence to growing military expenditures is gaining strength.

However, according to Kennedy, the opposition to Reagan is still very weak. Reagan’s adversaries are divided and the presentations they make are not fully effective. Meanwhile, Reagan has the capabilities to effectively counter any propaganda. In order to neutralize criticism that the talks between the USA and the USSR are non-constructive, Reagan will grandiose, but subjectively propagandistic. At the same time, Soviet officials who speak about disarmament will be quoted out of context, silenced or groundlessly and whimsically discounted. Although arguments and statements by officials of the USSR do appear in the press, it is important to note the majority of Americans do not read serious newspapers or periodicals.

Kennedy believes that, given the current state of affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people. In this regard, he offers the following proposals to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Y.V. Andropov:

1. Kennedy asks Y.V. Andropov to consider inviting the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting in July of this year. The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA. He would also like to inform you that he has planned a trip through Western Europe, where he anticipates meeting England’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Mitterand in which he will exchange similar ideas regarding the same issues.

If his proposals would be accepted in principle, Kennedy would send his representative to Moscow to resolve questions regarding organizing such a visit.

Kennedy thinks the benefits of a meeting with Y.V.Andropov will be enhanced if he could also invite one of the well known Republican senators, for example, Mark Hatfield. Such a meeting will have a strong impact on American and political circles in the USA (In March of 1982, Hatfield and Kennedy proposed a project to freeze the nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR and pblished a book on the theme as well.)

2. Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year, televised interviews with Y.V. Andropov in the USA. A direct appeal by the General Secretary to the American people will, without a doubt, attact a great deal of attention and interest in the country. The senator is convinced this would receive the maximum resonance in so far as television is the most effective method of mass media and information.

If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interview. Specifically, the president of the board of directors of ABC, Elton Raul and television columnists Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters could visit Moscow. The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.

Furthermore, with the same purpose in mind, a series of televised interviews in the USA with lower level Soviet officials, particularly from the military would be organized. They would also have an opportunity to appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR, with their own arguments about maintaining a true balance of power between the USSR and the USA in military term. This issue is quickly being distorted by Reagan’s administration.

Kennedy asked to convey that this appeal to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is his effort to contribute a strong proposal that would root out the threat of nuclear war, and to improve Soviet-American relations, so that they define the safety of the world. Kennedy is very impressed with the activities of Y.V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders, who expressed their commitment to heal international affairs, and improve mutal understandings between peoples.

The senator underscored that he eagerly awaits a reply to his appeal, the answer to which may be delivered through Tunney.

Having conveyed Kennedy’s appeal to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Tunney also explained that Senator Kennedy has in the last few years actively made appearances to reduce the threat of war. Because he formally refused to partake in the election campaign of 1984, his speeches would be taken without prejudice as they are not tied to any campaign promises. Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988. At that time, he will be 56 and his personal problems, which could hinder his standing, will be resolved (Kennedy has just completed a divorce and plans to remarry in the near future). Taken together, Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president. This would explain why he is convinced that none of the candidates today have a real chance at defeating Reagan.

We await instructions.

President of the committee
V. Chebrikov

Devotees of Senator Kennedy undoubtedly found his behavior to be courageous, altruistic, and brave, that he was willing to risk federal prosecution in order to ease the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States in pursuit of his attempts to de-weaponize both nations of their nuclear viciousness.  This is hogwash and codswallop, pure and simple.  While President Reagan was tautly concentrating on a matching of wits with the nation's fiercest enemy, Senator Kennedy was trying to throw the game.  It is called treason, and in any truly democratic republic he would have answered for his crimes.   But this is America, and we have our social castes as well as the next; Ted Kennedy walked away from justice on this as surely as he did in Chappaquiddick.

Members and friends of the Kennedy family are grieving, and I respect their grief.  But I cannot sit by and watch the media cannonize this fatally flawed man, this product of rarified air who lived so far beyond the rules both personally and professionally.  His was a march to the Left, and he did this country great injustice when he repeatedly marched right over its citizens and its Constitution.  Rest in peace, Senator.  Now the rewrite begins.

No doubt about it.  Our health care system as it stands today ain't what it used to be.  Thanks to the current administration, we all can pretty much identify what's wrong with it:  Denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, denial of services based on cost factors, limited choices in types of coverage as well as insurers, high premiums, limited portability of policies in spite of HIPAA's best efforts, and a blossoming of part-time jobs where full-time ones used to flourish so employers can avoid having to provide coverage at all. 

These problems are not new and Obamacare is not the first attempt to deal with them.  Unions first popularized the concept of employer-provided health care in the post-WWII era after FDR gave them collective bargaining authority through the Wagner Act.  Medicare and Medicaid came about under LBJ in 1965, using the same ponzi-scheme format for funding that the Social Security Act used; initial beneficiaries who never paid into the funds receive benefits paid for by current subscribers, with each generation of beneficiaries being funded by subscribers still in the workforce.  Even a Madoff investor could see where this would end, and subsequent congressional committees have struggled with the funding issue over and over and over, resulting in onerous regulations, price cuts and controls, and the inevitable degradation of health care quality.  The Children's Health Insurance Program came into being in 1997, granting federal funds to states to insure children without any pre-existing health care insurance.  Real attempts to turn things around were attempted by the Clintons, which scared the bejazzers out of a public not ready for socialized medicine, and by President George W. Bush, which his Democratic detractors successfully ignored and vanished.  Once again an administration is attempting to tackle the "third rail" of health care reform, and the reactions have been emotional and forceful on all sides.  As did the Clintons, the Obama administration sees their plan as the next 'logical' step; it makes health care a government program that continues on the path set into motion with FDR and drop-kicked along that same socialistic path by LBJ and the Clintons.

Although almost no one is passive about what they think ought to happen to "fix" health care, very very few actually know much about the issues.  This includes not only the Average Joes carrying picket signs at townhall meetings, and union members and community organizers (whatever the heck THAT is!) also carrying picket signs, (except theirs are weighted with lead, the better to kabong Average Joes with), health care providers who know most everything in their own speciality but not much outside of it, and politicians who vote to make laws everyone else must follow without having read the bills first because they can't understand the legalese used by the staffers and lobbyist lawyers when written on their behalf, and besides, they are too long--like this sentence.  So there is little comprehension, but a whole lot of passion!

Like so many things in life, health care issues can be understood using a simplified sort of balance sheet; of income and expenses and of benefits and drawbacks.  Income into the health care system comes from payment of money in exchange for health care services.  Money is paid for insurance premiums, for deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses or for self-insured (read: cash customers) treatment, from corporations and from government as reimbursement for services already provided, and from charities.  Traditionally, health care started in the typical insurance indemnity model, meaning the insurance company agreed to protect the subscriber from total financial loss in the event of a big-time (catastrophic) medical bill, such as with hospitalization or chronic illness.  Use of an indemnity model involves calculations of risk; someone who has the factors to pose more risk to the insurance company to have to pay for service is either charged more money or is excluded from getting insurance altogether.  An alternative model, based on the private medical societies of the turn of the century, started up just after WWII.  In this model, called the "concierge" model, or HMO model, a doctor agrees to provide whatever medical services are needed for a constant flat fee paid by all subscribers.  Current HMO providers offer additional health care services besides just doctor care; they operate off the belief that medical expenses can be kept lower if the HMO has control over all of them.  Health care is also paid for by charities, both in the form of payment for services and in the form of providing medical care themselves (think of Shriners' hospitals and doctors providing care for children, or Lions Clubs' blindness prevention/care programs and hospitals).  Religious groups contribute greatly to charity-provided medical care, and their presence is evident in the names of many hospitals across the country.  A more recent innovation in medical care payment is the health savings account, where pre-tax dollars are put away by the individual and used to pay for medical care, including insurance premiums, over-the-counter medications and treatments, and even dental and vision care.

Besides the expected expenses of providing health care (employee salaries, hospitalization, costs of treatment, supplies, medications, malpractice and other liability insurances, taxes and all the other costs associated with running a business in this country today), health care has added costs that have been building up over time:

•   Mandated coverage, where government passes a law saying certain conditions must be covered in any insurance policy issued in its jurisdiction.  When the State of Massachusetts initially passed its universal health care plan there were 43 mandated coverages in place already.  Popular mandates include prenatal care, smoker cessation programs, abortions and birth control, mental health, drug detoxification/treatment, and in-vitro fertility programs.  In the City of San Francisco, one of the mandates is for sexual-reorientation procedures.  The idea behind mandates is that if everyone pays a little more whether or not they will use the coverage, then the cost to the subscribers who actually need the program won't be prohibitive.  Thus prenatal care is subsidized by males, post-menopausal women and sterile folks.  As far back as 1999 it was shown that one out of four people in this country priced out of health care coverage found themselves in this predicament because of costs associated with mandates.  A new mandate that is being slipped into the health care dialog is one calling for computerized patient records.  Although it is not a specific treatment program like those mentioned above, health care providers and insurance companies will not be compensated for providing this service, meaning subscribers will bear the costs entirely.  More on this later. 
  
• Undocumented residents (or, to call it what it is, illegal aliens) have access to health care coverage in several ways.  They can purchase coverage; there is no requirement that one be a citizen to purchase health insurance, not in this country or in other countries where policies are offered for sale.  They can receive treatment at a charity-sponsored health care agency or via a nonprofit organization.  Or, they can walk into any emergency room in the country and get treated.  In 1986 the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMLATA) was passed to prevent hospitals from "dumping" patients without adequate means to pay for treatment onto government hospitals, jeopardizing the lives of the patients in the process.  Today, that translates to anyone can walk into any ER in any hospital in the country and be treated for whatever they complain of, regardless of ability to pay for it.  Anyone.  This way no one dies over ability to pay, but the unintended consequences of doing good have been significant.  Emergency rooms have become severely impacted, meaning you can wait hours and hours before you are seen for treatment.  Bilingual emergency staff and/or translators are needed in order to provide proper care, and they are compensated above the level of their monolingual peers for their talents.  Because of the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment (just about anyone born on US soil is automatically a US citizen), hospitals have been inundated with foreign mothers delivering their so-called "anchor" babies.  A considerable portion of the $34.5 billion in uncompensated medical care costs reimbursed by taxpayers in 2003 was attributable to these women and their offspring.  In California, over 60 hospitals have closed in the last decade because of uncompensated medical care costs, and just over 50% of those costs are attributable to people who broke the law to get here.  Regardless of where you come down on the issue of border control, the medical costs have had a big hand in pushing the health care debate to the forefront.
• The rising cost of medical supplies has become a significant factor in the expense of health care.  Raw materials used in the manufacture of medical supplies and devices, such as plastics, stainless steel and other metals, paper and medication/treatment components, have skyrocketed in cost as the demand for these raw materials from emerging nations such as China and India have risen.  In the past couple of decades employee wage and benefit mandates, coupled with the costs of litigation, pushed the cost of employment up to the point that medical providers have found it cheaper to use disposable supplies than to hire and pay for someone to sterilize the equipment for reuse.  Now, however, medical providers are taking a second look at those disposables, because buying them from suppliers in these emerging nations has brought about even more product safety liability; damned if you do, damned if you don't.  The Medical Device Amendments of 1976 limited litigation over product performance of medical devices to federal action, specifically because the concern of Congress at that time was to prevent hampering the growing industry that was working so much in the way of medical miracles by a barrage of lawsuits filed by lawyers in 50 states, while still providing recourse through federal courts for consumers.  This year Congressmen Henry Waxman (remember that name; it comes up repeatedly in the health care debate, and not in a good way) and Frank Pallone and Senators Edward Kennedy and Patrick Leahy have filed the Medical Device Safety Act of 2009, removing the limitation and allowing lawsuits to be filed at the state level.  Without a doubt, this translates to higher health care costs.  Their rationale for doing this?  Well, it was done to the pharmaceutical corporations in 2006, so why not include devices?  And we all know how well that worked out cost-wise for the pharmaceuticals...and us, don't we?
• With the growing number of expenses associated with health care that simply were not there before, there has been a growing misuse of existing resources.  The Emergency Room has become today's clinic for the uninsured, often because their share of coverage is nothing or so much less than for clinic or office care, and because clinics for the uninsured are so impacted they cannot wait that long for care.  Triage systems exist in all ERs; the worst-off patients are seen first.  But with lines of people packing the waiting rooms and often trailing out the door, people slip through the cracks.  Someone who was feeling a little peculiar at the beginning of their wait can easily blossom into a full cardiac arrest in between triage checks. In California, nurse-to-patient ratios have been set into law, thanks to the tireless efforts of its nursing unions.  However, as most ER nurses can tell you, severity of the patient is not the factor. Four patients sounds good, until all four are critical at the same time, and none of this applies to the patients in the waiting room who have yet to be assigned to a nurse!  Instead of allowing medical staff to make decisions themselves in the best interest of the patient, government has foisted a decision and it has resulted in tragedies.  A mandatory 1:5 nurse-to-patients ratio on a med-surg unit, even at night when patients are usually asleep, means staffing at the minimum will occur elsewhere in the hospital when an extra nurse could make a real difference.  At the time nurse-patient ratios were adopted in California the nursing union estimated there was a shortage of about 5,000 nurses to meet the ratio requirements.  A study done by UCSF estimated that number to be 10,000, with a projected shortage of 100,000-120,000 statewide by the year 2030. While government mandated nurse-patient ratios, they were unable to mandate the creation of more nurses, making the ones available more expensive.  Doctors, who have been cut back repeatedly by politicians who believe they know how much reimbursement is reasonable for caring for Medicare/Medicaid patients, now have to focus on volume instead of quality of care in order to make ends meet (and I mean this literally; doctors are right up there on the career ladder today in foreclosures, auto repossessions, and credit card delinquencies).  One dermatologist recently disclosed she is seeing around 65 patients a day in order to maintain her income.  Hospitals and doctors have been accused of ordering unnecessary tests to protect from liability and to pad billing.  This is true to some extent; they respond to the situation they have and do the best they can with it.  This has led to the practice of "Stab and Lab" in the ER; patients are routinely given an IV port and blood work is drawn before they are seen by the doctor.  While it is against the law to use "standing orders", hospitals now call this "preliminary orders" to get around it.  Why a port instead of just a stick?  Stab and Lab accomplishes two things:  it saves time, so the doctor can see more patients, and it adds cost to the care given. If more extensive lab work is required, no time will be lost in doing a second stick.  In more than 90% of the time lab work is necessary for the doctor to evaluate patient condition, but in the remaining 10% of, say, twisted ankles, shallow lacerations, or the druggie looking for scripts who was just here yesterday, it just isn't warranted.  Again, the cost is added into the overall cost of health care and is contributary to its rise.
• Once upon a time, in my lifetime, the family doc was a GP, meaning a general practitioner.  All doctors become GPs first, and then study further in specialities to become, say, an internist or a family practitioner, which have largely replaced GPs.  GPs made house calls.  They met you at their office late at night when your kid was sick with flu and couldn't stop coughing.  They gave suckers to kids who took their immunization injections bravely, and they gave advice to moms.  They did this because they had at least 2 years less schooling to pay off than their specialist buddies did.  They did this because they saw their patients first and were pretty much the gateway to specialty care, keeping Johnny-Has-A-Cold out of the Emergency Room.  They were able to charge reasonable rates for office visits that patients could just pay, eliminating the need to employ insurance billing clerks and to have to wait for reimbursement payments that arrive 4-6 months later. They delivered babies, applied casts, wrapped ankles, and dispensed cough syrup.  And they referred to specialists when it was warranted for the good of the patient.  Today an insurance clerk makes that decision.  An ER doc dispenses cough syrup and Tylenol -- by prescription.  An Orthopod applies a cast, an OB-GYN delivers babies, and a Neurologist or even an accupuncturist treats your pain.  We pay a lot for expertise that simply isn't needed, and government tries to "fix" that by reimbursing Medicare/Medicaid rates below what it costs for the doctor to provide care.  In the interests of streamlining regulation and under the guise of improved patient care, government is now wanting to mandate electronic patient records, as they have done in the Veterans Administration system.  (Of course, the first thing we heard about was hackers getting into that system and stealing away with patient identities!) In California LVNs count half as much as an RN in meeting hospital nurse-patient ratios, which means there are very few lower-waged LVNs employed in hospitals anymore because of the employer costs-per-employee.  Unions have had a hard time getting traction with nurses in the past, but in many states they have begun to make inroads, with the resultant increase in wages and benefits one always sees when unions try to justify their monthly charge for the brass ring.  More and more government regulation and mandatory reporting requires more administration staff (which any hospital business person can tell you is counterproductive, since you cannot bill for administrative services -- only patient services).  And finally, in the past couple of decades, we all have been witness to the passing of community hospitals and the emergence of Medical Centers Grade 1-V.
• Most of what has torqued our health care system has come from laws that have been passed, allegedly for our own good.  Tax law says corporations can deduct the cost of providing medical coverage to employees, but employees who provide their own coverage cannot deduct it until the cost exceeds 7% of gross income and does not exceed some other ceiling level.  Policies issued in one state are not available or transferable across state lines.  Tort laws vary from state to state, although 11 states have now enacted restrictions usually centered on non-economic damages awards and possibly punitive damage awards.  In 2008 the government (both federal and state) was estimated to have control over 59.8% of health care spending.  And it hasn't helped one bit!

In my next installment, I will discuss some of the ideas floating around to make changes to our health care status quo.  Some have been tested, some are still theoretical.  It is my belief that there is a whole lot that can be done to make health care accessible, affordable, and easy to use, but none of that is possible under Obamacare.

There is a difference between the "End of Life" component of Congress' HB 3200 and the Palin-labeled "death panels".  Otherwise intelligent bloggers, commentators, and talk-show hosts have demonstrated the confusion over these two terms by their own contributions to the melding of the two items into one frightening concept.

End of Life counseling is social services, plain and simple.  It is discussion with folks about expressing their wishes about heroic measures in legal documents, called advanced medical directives, that will be used to enforce their wishes, should the need arise in the future.  If, at some point, something terrible happens and someone ends up on life support equipment in a hospital, a Living Will advises medical personnel and family members what the victim wants to happen; stay on life support and pursue all possible means to prolong life or disconnect the machines and let death occur naturally.  Everyone has their own ideas about what they would want to see happen in this instance, and a Living Will, along with a Durable Power Of Attorney For Healthcare, makes sure one's wishes are known and someone responsible will make sure those wishes are carried out.  End of Life counseling has been taking place in this country since the 70s, especially whenever someone is hospitalized.

The "death panels" Governor Palin identified are something else completely.  President Obama has already created his panel of health care experts, empowering and funding them to the tune of $1.1 billion in H.R. 1, the Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka the 'Stimulus Bill', or if you are a bit more jaded, the 'Porkulus Bill').  The panel is called the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research and is composed of unelected members appointed by the President.  One very notorious member of this newly-created council is Dr. Ezekial Emmanuel, whose position papers advocating the rationing of health care services based on one patient's ability to contribute more to society and the economy than another has been recently dissected most effectively by Dr. Betsy McCaughey. In his paper, Dr. Emmanuel analyzes life value of an infant vs. an adolescent -- the adolescent is more valuable because society has already invested education dollars and therefore he/she may be expected to contribute more to society than an infant who has yet to have the investment of education made upon him/her.  He joins with former Senator Tom Daschle (whose idea for such a council was spelled out in his book, Critical:  What We Can Do About The Health-Care Crisis) in advocating rationing healthcare services to seniors in order to save money, declaring that Americans need to be more like Europeans in passively accepting "hopeless diagnoses" and "forgo experimental treatments".  In fact, the President's vision of health care comes directly out of Daschle's book.  Here is where we find physician-assisted suicide, such as is already in practice in Oregon (which is where one woman whose cancer recurred was denied the one drug that might help her survive, but was advised there was funding for suicide if she wished!).  Here is where the "death panels" take form and manifest out of our worst nightmares, and here is where the very young and very old find themselves in peril.

If we are able to stop our belligerent runaway President, Congress, and Senate from putting fatal shots into our health care system, and that is a huge 'if', it will take everything we can muster within ourselves.  We cannot afford to be inaccurate in our details, because each time we are, it will be thrown back in our faces and used to convince Middle America that we are crying "Wolf" while they parade around in their sheepskins.  We need to stop misusing the term "End of Life" as if means "death panels" and protest its inclusion in any health care bill because it is social services, NOT health care.  We need to have our conservative representatives do what they can to hamstring the real 'death panel' and its driven, unelected members until such time as we can do away with it entirely; the very last thing our health care system needs in another bureaucracy handing down even more mandates that make it unaffordable.

Make no mistake:  this will be a fight to the finish.  Even the smallest toe in the health care door by the current administration will wrench our health care away from us in a heartbeat.  We cannot afford to compromise, and we cannot afford to be in error.

In a fever of kumbaya, a bit more than half of the voters in the 2008 election supported a man who spoke in dulcet tones of "hope", "change", and "unity"... and his monkey. 

Eight months later, we've seen our own hope disintegrate as change after extreme change smacks us over the head, and we learn that "unity" refers to the faithful Left ... and the unions.  Oh, and ACORN, of course.  The rest of us are asked to shut up and get out of the way.

But something unanticipated has happened on the way to socialized medicine.  People are speaking up.  LOUDLY.  In spite of news stories of thugs beating up on opposers, in spite of hand-picked townhall participants, in spite of name-calling and aspersion-casting newsbites from our elected leadership, they're still showing up and speaking up.  The message they are shouting is "Don't screw up my health care!"

But is it enough?  There is no question that the health care system as it operates in this country today is flawed, and not just a little.  Every mandate from government, every rule and regulation, even seemingly unrelated changes in our country such as the huge influx of illegal aliens into our midst, has taken its toll on what was once a vibrant free market system.

When exactly did 'health care' become synonymous with 'health insurance'?  It's been an insidious journey, but it concluded just a couple of weeks ago when President Obama changed his 'health care' plan to his 'health insurance' plan and began demonizing insurance companies.  It's been a long journey, taking the country from turn-of-the-century benevolent health care societies to today's vigorous debate over government-provided health care, via the cracking whip of mandates.  The first real step in this direction actually began under FDR and his Wagner Act/National Labor Relations Act, which empowered unions in this country and gave them the right of collective bargaining.  Health insurance became one of the issues addressed during labor negotiations, along with wages, employee breaks, and safe working conditions.  Of course, at this point in time and up to the early 1960s, health care was generally inexpensive and insurance policies covered catastrophic events such as hospitalizations.  The first prepaid health insurance plan, where subscribers paid premiums to an insurance company and the company paid the doctor and his hospital so much money per day per subscriber for unlimited access, was started by a Dr. Garfield in the Mojave Desert and became the forerunner of Kaiser Permanente as it was established in 1945.  In 1973 Ted Kennedy authored the HMO Act of 1973 which required any employer providing indemnity health insurance to provide an HMO alternative as well, and to spend just as much money, a requirement that was modified somewhat in 1988.  In the 80s and 90s we saw the demise of all but the largest of HMOs because the system simply did not work well without large numbers of payees who rarely used it to sustain it.  In 1993 Kennedy's HMO Act of 1973 expired.  In the post-1973 era, indemnity health insurance (meaning policies that are priced based on evaluations of risk, which is the historical basis of all types of insurance apart from health insurance) companies have modified their coverage to include doctor visits, medications, chiropractic treatment, counseling, and even accupuncture in order to compete with HMOs. And Congress has not let up on the mandates.  Insurers must also provide mental health coverage. Pre-existing conditions, a large factor in establishing indemnity risk, may no longer be excluded for longer than 1 year and soon may not be excluded for any time period.   In many states, prenatal care is also mandated, whether it is wanted or not.  And across the country the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMLATA, mandates all hospitals to provide treatment to whoever walks in the door.  Period.  What we have here is a hodgepodge created by lack of knowledge on the part of both the consumer (us) and congressional regulators (them).

So what do consumers want out of health care?  They want the best treatment for their ailments available.  They want doctors who are smart and up to date on the latest in health research.  They want to be seen and treated immediately, or at least in a reasonable amount of time -- meaning in time to prevent things from getting any bit worse.  They want to pay for themselves, joining with others willing to pay for themselves; they do not want to pay for those who don't pay for themselves, or for those who come to this country illegally who do not pay and who have babies here so they do not have to leave.  They want providers to have the equipment and supplies on hand necessary to treat them when they arrive in need of treatment.  They want emergency responders to sustain them until they arrive at emergency rooms able to save their lives; they expect the triage system to put their emergency ahead of Johnny-has-a-cold and NOT lump them in together as 'all patients entitled to the same care'.  And they want to be able to afford the payment for this care.

That's it.  That's all of it.  Can this be accomplished under the current system we now have?  No.  Services being provided to illegal aliens (the only folks not eligible for Medicaid) and noninsured or underinsured folks with no assets are called 'nonreimbursable'.  In some parts of the country, nonreimbursable rates are running as high as 50%.  What happens to medical providers when their nonreimbursable rates escalate?  Why, they up the charges to those who can pay!  It's no secret; every provider has a two-tiered fee schedule.  So that 'affordable' part of the consumer wish list moves away, up out of reach.  Today, the monthly premium for a bare-bones catastrophic policy now costs the same as the most comprehensive plan once did.

According to the President (and I say this because I have not yet read all the details of the current legislation, but it's next on my list), what is included in his proposal extends health care to millions of uninsured.  But his plan calls for set reimbursement rates, which translates to exit, stage left, of any medical provider capable of making tracks. Bye-bye adequate supplies and equipment, smart doc, and being seen quickly, hello rationing. And since Mr. Obama announced yesterday in Mexico that he will not tackle "immigration issues", meaning the influx of those across our borders who should not be here, until he has finished with cap-and-slap and health care. 

Any takers?  : < }

Yes, health care reform must happen before the system will function they way we want it, but instead of real reform, we're getting a crayon-scrawled game plan on a napkin.  We need insurers to differentiate clearly between prepaid health care for those who don't mind paying more to get more and catastrophic indemnity plans for those who want to pay less and be covered for less.  We need Congress to enforce our borders, to remove unfunded mandates to insurers who will respond with policies for which there are markets, and to end this insane insistence that employers be responsible to provide health insurance on behalf of the employee .  We need our judiciary to end the stupid, harmful interpretation of the 14th Amendment that created anchor babies.  We need to expand, not eliminate health savings accounts.  We need tort reform to protect providers from lawsuits filed whenever providers demonstrate that, despite their best efforts, the system is not fail-safe and they are not God.  We need the 'insurance pool' to be nationwide, and that means removing the elements driving the prices up out of reach of the average person.  And we need to encourage by whatever means available charity groups that extend a health care helping hand to those truly in need and unable to help themselves.  Are you listening, elected bigwigs?

*sigh*  I thought not.  Because this is not about us.  It's about them.