The Patriot Post Brief 9-39

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The Patriot Post Brief 9-39
From The Federalist Patriot
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"As always, Alexander's essay was well written, informative, and most of all, inspiring. After reading The Patriot Post, I'm once again proud to call myself an American, a Constitutionalist, and a Patriot. Sometimes I get teary-eyed after reading the essays; partly because I know what a great country we have been in the past and partly because I know what a great country we WILL once again be in the future, regardless of how many politicians would like to make sure that does not happen. May God bless you for all you do for Him and His country!" --Rock Hill, South Carolina

"My son has been in Baghdad since May and because of his specialty, he has pretty good Internet access. I subscribed him to The Patriot Post, and he told me that for him and his colleagues, The Patriot is the highlight of their week. They tell us your weekday editions have become their window on what's going on back home. Couldn't ask for a better source! I've been a subscriber since you started publishing back in the 1990s, and rely on The Patriot's voice of sanity and reason as a reminder of our first principles. Thanks for all you do." --Westminster, Massachusetts

LIBERTY

"Most of our country's serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism. Take the financial crisis. One-third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Banks didn't mind making risky loans and Wall Street buyers didn't mind buying these repackaged loans because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout by taxpayers. Under a capitalist system, financial institutions would not have been intimidated or encouraged into making risky loans and neither would they have been bailed out if they did so. Social Security, Medicare and its coverage of prescription drugs have an unfunded liability that exceeds $100 trillion. When those roosters come home to roost, they will make the financial meltdown we've been though look like child's play. Not withstanding all of the demagoguery, it is capitalism not socialism that made us a great country and it's socialism that will be our undoing." --economist Walter Williams

INSIGHT

"I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country." --President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)

OPINION IN BRIEF

"The real reason Obama insists upon making the young and healthy buy insurance they don't want is not the relatively minor free-rider problem, but the potentially ruinous adverse selection problem: The most expensive patients are the ones who are most likely to sign up for coverage. To keep the official 10-year price tag of his plan below that magical $1 trillion threshold, he needs to balance sick people who rack up big bills with healthy people who pay for insurance but don't use it. Instead of acknowledging this reality, Obama portrays the healthy uninsured as irresponsible leeches. Even if Obama could make a plausible moral argument for the unprecedented step of demanding that all Americans buy insurance -- not in exchange for a particular privilege, such as driving on public roads, but simply by virtue of being alive -- he would be hard pressed to cite the constitutional authority for such a mandate. ... Obama might be on firmer ground if he portrayed the levy imposed on people who decline to buy insurance as an exercise of the congressional tax power. But he does not want to admit he is forsaking his campaign promise to refrain from raising taxes on households earning less than $250,000 a year. That's why ... he insisted that the 'excise tax' imposed on the uninsured by the Senate health care bill he supports is not really a tax. How so? After Obama signed a bill raising the federal cigarette tax, his press secretary explained that the tax pledge was still intact because 'people make a decision to smoke.' Likewise, Obama might argue, people make a decision not to buy health insurance. The lesson is clear: If you don't want to pay higher taxes, don't make any decisions." --columnist Jacob Sullum

GOVERNMENT

"There has been a sudden disclosure that, in the influential Senate Finance Committee's health care bill, there is a dangerous provision that could deny crucial health treatments for Medicare patients. This is ... a section that penalizes doctors for Medicare patients who, for at least five years (from 2015 to 2020), authorize total treatments that wind up in the top 10 percent of national annual Medicare costs per patient. The 1 in 10 Medicare doctors who spend beyond this limit will themselves lose 5 percent of their own total Medicare reimbursements. Considering the already low rates Medicare doctors get -- and the president pledges they will get lower -- this could be a heavy penalty. As Burke Balch, director of the National Right to Life's Center for Medical Ethics, says: 'This ... means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least-expensive tests and treatments for fear they will be caught in that top 10 percent. Note that this feature operates independently of any considerations of quality, efficiency or waste....' Medicare doctors will not be the only losers. As the doctors struggle to keep abreast of the continually falling limit of the money they can authorize for their contingent of patients, consider what those patients will lose in the quality of their treatment. ... Even if this insidious provision does not survive in the eventual Senate bill, or is excluded from the subsequent House-Senate Conference Committee report on what President Obama will eventually enact into law, its actual existence is a further warning to all of us to pay very close attention to all the health care 'reform' bills before any of them becomes law." --columnist Nat Hentoff

THE LAST WORD

"'Democrats lost Congress in 1994 because President Clinton failed to pass national health care.' I'm not sure if this is another example of the left's wishful-thinking method of analysis or if they're seriously trying to trick the Blue Dog Democrats into believing it. But I gather liberals consider the 1994 argument an important point because it was on the front page of The New York Times a few weeks ago in place of a story about Van Jones or ACORN. According to a news story by Jackie Calmes: 'In 1994, Democrats' dysfunction over fulfilling a new president's campaign promise contributed to the party's loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress.' That's not the way I remember it. The way I remember it, Republicans swept Congress in 1994 not because Clinton failed to nationalize health care, but because he tried to nationalize health care. HillaryCare failed because most Americans didn't want it. ... But just to check my recollection, I looked up the Times' own coverage of the 1994 congressional races. Republicans won a landslide election in 1994 based largely on the 'Contract With America,' which, according to the Times, promised 'tax cuts, more military spending and a balanced-budget amendment.' Far from complaining about Clinton incompetently failing to pass health care, the Times reported that Republicans were 'unabashedly claiming credit for tying Congress up in knots.' These claims were immediately followed by ... oh, what was that word again? Now I remember ... LANDSLIDE!" --columnist Ann Coulter

*****

Veritas vos Liberabit -- Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot's editors and staff.

(Please pray for our Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the world, and for their families -- especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)