Mumble Jumble

        If you take ill tomorrow and are hospitalized, the hospital will provide your care, without charge,  if you don’t have health insurance and without regard to citizenship.  That’s because in 1986 President Ronald Regan signed into law a federal mandate (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) that requires all Americans to pay for the health care of those Americans or non-Americans who have no health insurance.  So who pays the hospital?  All Americans, collectively, pay.  It’s accomplished through another federal mandate commonly referred to as income taxes and found in Title 26 of the U.S.Code.  The current fervor over the so called “individual mandate” found in the Affordable Care Act is merely a diversionary tactic by those lawmakers who have no answers for the economic quagmire they have put us in.  Their inexplicable opposition to this mandate belies their two decade old position espousing a health care mandate and gives credence to charges that this opposition is politically motivated.
        Yes, believe it or not, it was the Republican Party which gave birth to the idea of the health care mandate.   Now, it is the Republicans who are attempting to disown their offspring and want to throw the baby out the window along with the bathwater, diapers and Binky.  This behavior is contemptuous, obstructionist and focuses a light on their real motive.    The right wing is so consumed with hatred for Obama that they would disavow their own stated philosophy just to frustrate his efforts and make him look bad.  They would reject the reasonableness of Ronald Regan to impugn Barak Obama.  They have oppugned him at every turn and for no reason other than he is Barak Obama.  It is not out of the realm of belief that had Republicans known in advance of Obama’s mission to take out Bin Laden,  they would have undermined him and did everything in their power to insure a failed mission.  Their hatred has blinded them to the point where they will steer the ship of state into disaster just to enjoy observing the demise of Obama.  They are willing to sacrifice the well-being of the American People to witness his failure.  Some on the Right have even said, unabashedly, that they hope he fails.
        Obama’s mistake was capitulating to the insurance lobby and not insisting on  a “single-payer” system which likely would have been much more palatable to the American People and an easier sell..  Be that as it may, the mandate is now the law of the land and will remain so unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise.  To listen to the Right , one would think that the idea of the mandate was lifted out of the pages of the Communist Manifesto.  Far from that, the idea of mandates is woven into the fabric of our Republic.  Mandates have been with us since our inception and are not going away anytime soon.  There have been as many mandates proposed by the Left as by the Right.   The lives of all Americans are touched by State and Federal mandates on a daily basis.
        If you want to drive in any of forty-nine states, you will be mandated by that state to carry insurance, not on yourself but, on others. If you want an abortion (which is a legal medical procedure in the U.S.)  you are now mandated by some states to undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound as well as other mandated procedures. If you reside in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you are mandated to carry health insurance. If you are opposed to war based on your religion, you are mandated to fund it through your income taxes whether or not you believe it infringes on your religious freedom.  If you work in this country, you are mandated to pay unemployment insurance. If you want to work, you are mandated to pay for the health care of others even if you don’t have health insurance on yourself. Buy a light bulb and the government mandates what kind.  So why is there so much attention being focused on this mandate?   The answer to that is obvious.  It was proposed by Obama and the unspoken mantra on the Right is, “If  Obama proposed it, we oppose it.”  What we need is a mandate that mandates that no new mandates should be passed until our lawmakers address the economic doldrums that they have visited upon us.  We should also be asking those who oppose the individual mandate what their solution is to spiraling health care costs and an ever growing class of uninsured Americans.  Are we to continue to allow our citizens and non-citizens to use the ER as their primary provider of care?  That’s what will happen if the Supreme Court finds the mandate unconstitutional.  Are we really prepared to pay the cost of not having a system in place to contain costs?

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