The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in a Florida District Court.
The pleadings, in part, read –
The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.
–State of Florida, et al. vs. HHSIt turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.
In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
I guess Adams was the most soshulist of the Founding Fathers.
(h/t Reader K)
Sly
Adams also signed the Treaty of Tripoli, making him the most Secret Muslimish of the Founding Fathers.
robertdsc-PowerBook
I wonder whatever happened to that government-run system.
Little Boots
I like Doug.
I just want to say it, because I always seem to be arguing with him.
But this is wonderfully true.
Tax Analyst
“He did?…Ahem…Well, never mind, on to our next point. {to co-counsel: “One of these is bound to work.}
Ija
I bet they’ll focus on this to highlight the difference between the two cases.
Xenos
‘All men will be sailors then,
Until the sea shall free them.’
Little Boots
Bill Maher said it best: the Founders would hate the Tea Partiers’ guts.
Bill Murray
The conservatives only remember Adams for the Alien and Sedition Acts
rootless_e
Weird that the intentions of the authors of the 14th amendment never come up in these originalist discussions.
On health care, a decision authored, in theory, by Clarence Thomas holds that contract law in the state of Texas is invalidated even for a transaction taking place entirely within Texas by the implication of a Federal law even though this reading of the law deprives all citizens of any redress under the law for damages. And yet, Wingers never complained about that. It’s almost as if they were serf-like corporate hacks who don’t really have any principles at all.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ija: Hopefully, though, the DOJ lawyer won’t let them change the subject to this. Instead, he should state “the purpose of this example is not to prove that the founding fathers had an idea of what health
insurancecare should look like, but that the original intent argument does not fly because they were more than willing to require people to contribute to a collective benefit.”Little Boots
@Bill Murray:
It’s small and petty, but in that Adams show on HBO, I really think they should have gone into detail about that. We need to know about that, as a nation, and incidentally, we have to remember the Founders could be complete Dicks.
Little Boots
Oh, please, you goobers cannot be going to sleep already.
Little Boots
Doug, I’m reaching out.
General Stuck
Politics is the same now as it was in Adam’s time, and the constitution was left vague, except with a ginormous confounding loophole of promoting the general welfare and that business about interstate commerce. We have defined those things through the political process, which is what wingnuts usually are screaming about after they scream about activist liberal judges. They are full of shit, and so are we, that is the beauty of our system. The founders gave us three branches to duke out the details, because all politics is, is what it’s always been, with only a few sparsely deployed guardrails in the founding doc.
There are no heroes in politics, left or right, only people who want something, and people who want something else.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Little Boots: One of the things I have often wondered about the viewers of this site is their geographic distribution. Are we distributed evenly across the time zones, or are more of us concentrated in one zone, the east coast for example?
Little Boots
There are still heroes. Lincoln. FDR. And more problematically, LBJ. Obama really has to decide to be that, or not.
Little Boots
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Good point.
That was a little rude of me, but still, I’m in the Midwest. You Easterners chime in.
Little Boots
Damn, meant Westerners. Oh, good god, I should not be yelling at anyone.
LosGatosCA
Well, we know Adams palled around with insurrectionists who had no regard for contemporary governing institutions and he would have defended the folks at Gitmo – see Boston Massacre.
So only two questions remain – was he born in Kenya and what did his countertops look like?
Little Boots
@LosGatosCA:
You know he defended those terrorist British soldiers, right? Better keep an eye on him.
Tattoosydney
@rootless_e:
How dare you, sir and/or madam?
Xenos
@Little Boots: Some of us just got out of bed. Time to clean up after last night’s festivities. Ooh. Coffee.
As for the Adams history, it makes a nice companion piece to Hayak’s Chapter 9 of ‘The Road to Serfdom’, as quoted by Sully here. Hayek and Adams are at least as sochialist as Obama, whodathunk?
Tattoosydney
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Some of us are halfway around the world in tomorrow.
PTirebiter
@Xenos: Yea, but all his bones were broken long before the clinic opened…
Little Boots
@Xenos:
That’s awfully deep think for Sully, but I’ll accept it. And yeah, I think most of the Founders were a hell of a lot less traumatized by Teh Socialims than the average politician, Democrat or Republican, today.
Little Boots
So where’ Doug?
DougJ DougJson
@Little Boots:
Sleepy….
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney: Damn International Date Line! How does it work?!?
Little Boots
@DougJ DougJson:
well, wake up dammit, your posts are really interesting, although I will continue to yell at them, sometimes.
PTirebiter
I’ve always liked President Grant’s take on it in his autobiography.
“It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies. At the time of the framing of our constitution the only physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and do his labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe.”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Tattoosydney: That would definitely be another interesting stat: how many outside the US connect.
Part of the reason I am curious about this is because I am in the Central Time Zone, and I can almost tell when it is 11am here, or 4pm. Traffic drops considerably based on what I see as a change in the frequency of comments. I am assuming that it is because a lot of people out east are heading home.
ETA: Edited for clarity.
Little Boots
@PTirebiter:
In fact, didn’t Jefferson, a founder, sort of say that? Stop treating them like Gods, they hated that shit.
kdaug
Petty remittance for rum, sodomy and the lash.
NR
Sorry, but the comparison is invalid. This law is not a precedent for a mandate to buy private health insurance.
Congress required sailors to pay a tax to the federal government, which then used that revenue to provide the sailors with health care. The sailors paid a tax to the government and received a government service in return. That, of course, is perfectly constitutional. But it has nothing to do with the health care law, which requires people to give money to private corporations which take a big chunk of it to line the pockets of shareholders and CEOs.
Little Boots
@NR:
Oh, just go with it, you don’t think the Constitution is endlessly elastic? Do you know Corporations are magically people? They are. And somehow an insurance mandate is the thing that cannot happen? Please.
Violet
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
According to Alexa, 86.1% are from the US, India/UK/Canada are 2.3% each, and 6.9% are from somewhere else.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Little Boots: and money is speech, so some people just have more than others. What could be more in line with Enlightenment ideals?
PTirebiter
@Little Boots: It seems to me that they were all big on the value of humility at the time.
I think they would have disproved of Rove’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich.
Little Boots
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Exactly, what do you think resembles the English Court of the 18th century more?
Can we get real, as a country?
aliasofwestgate
@NR:
Actually, that model is very much like the Canadian version and the Australian version. The citizens are taxed for it, and everyone receives it. They have the option to also get coverage through private insurance companies–but most of their cost is already covered by the Provincial/National plan. The private insurance just covers what isn’t paid by the national coverage.
Violet
@NR:
It’s going to be interesting to watch how this plays out. The rightwing folks are the ones bringing the lawsuits against the health care law. But if they win, their buddies the health insurance companies will be the ones who lose all the new, mandated customers. So they won’t be happy about it.
Will the health insurance companies pressure their conservative buddies to drop the lawsuits? Will they run ads to try to convince the public the law is great so public opinion turns toward it and pressure builds to keep the law? How’s is going to play out?
Little Boots
@PTirebiter:
And again. yeah. What the hell are we talking about?
morzer
One small piece of amusing and good news:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/ppp-president-palin-barely-edging-obama—-in-texas.php
Now, if we can just get the media to stop wasting time on Alaska’s version of Cruella de Vil….
rootless_e
winger legal theory is very much akin to libertarian morality in that it’s not really based on any principles at all other than a kind of petty mean-spiritedness and craven desire for a boot on the neck. We really need to bring back the Alien and Sedition Act and deal harshly with these people. They are not fit to live in a free society except as chain gang workers.
Little Boots
@rootless_e:
I actually think real Libertarianism has real principles, but actual Libertarianism has exactly the principles you would expect from the richest class of Americans.
hilts
Doug,
As a tribute to Keith Olbermann, would you consider temporarily blogging under the moniker Dougj Olbermensch?
Xenos
The silliness about the individual mandate is going to tear the GOP coalition to pieces. If the IM unconstitutional then the only constitutional solution to the health care financing crisis is something along the lines of a single-payer system.
At the point when the populist/libertarian movement created to revive the GOP goes directly against Wall Street we will see who really has power, and who funds whom. If the Teapartisans get their way and block the ACA they will be giving Obama a huge opportunity for 2012. If the Insurance industry wins this a lot of the Teapartisans are going to stay home in 2012, or break into dozens of discrete movements.
Little Boots
@Xenos:
I think you’re right, about all of this.
rootless_e
@Little Boots:
I was just reminding some libertarians about Hayeks fine words spoken in Chile as the secret police were widely known to be torturing and murdering people
Absolute powers that need to be used precisely in order to avoid and limit any absolute power in the future. It may seem a contradiction that it is I of all people who am saying this, I who plead for limiting government’s powers in people’s lives and maintain that many of our problems are due, precisely, to too much government. However, when I refer to this dictatorial power, I am talking of a transitional period, solely. As a means of establishing a stable democracy and liberty, clean of impurities. This is the only way I can justify it – and recommend it
love that “clean of impurities” line – such a classic bit of authoritarian psychopathology to indicate exactly what Fred meant about individual liberty all that time.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@NR: See my statement here. The point of the example is not to say this is how health care should be done or that this is how the founding fathers wanted it done. It is to show that the argument that the founding fathers would have been against requiring people to get coverage is bogus.
Yutsano
@Xenos:
I consider either of these options acceptable. In fact I will relish with great delight if they manage to block the individual mandate but everything else stays intact. Then we get to watch the insurance companies scramble like chickens as their entire business model goes to shit.
hilts
@morzer:
Another embarrassing showing for Sarah Palin
WMUR, ABC News, NH GOP 2012 Straw Poll
Mitt Romney 35%
Ron Paul 11%
Tim Pawlenty 8%
Sarah Palin 7%
Michele Bachmann 5%
Jim DeMint 5%
h/t http://politicalscoop.wmur.com/results-wmur-abc-news-nh-gop-2012-straw-poll
Little Boots
@rootless_e:
Hayek was kind of a Dick. But Adam Smith was not. If Libertarians actually read Adam Smith, and agreed, I think this would be a better country.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@rootless_e: Sounds a little too much like the Stainless Steel Rat for President:
Xenos
@Yutsano: It would be fun if the Senate would pass a one-page bill repealing the Individual Mandate yet keeping the rest of the ACA on the books, and sent it over to the House. The leadership would try to bottle it up, and the freshman Republicans would go apeshit. Or the freshman would knuckle under and the Teapartisans would go apeshit.
MattR
@hilts: Finally getting around to watching the premiere of Onion News Network from last night. They just had a bit showing that Palin’s polling is getting a boost from Americans morbid curiosity about what a Palin White House would be like.
morzer
@Xenos:
It’s a nice thought, but the GOP is just as likely to try and defund healthcare reform and then do nothing, with some gutting of the safety net thrown in on grounds of fiscal prudence. Their base would be happy enough with that outcome. They’ve got very short-term minds, and little analytical capacity or interest in the past.
Little Boots
@morzer:
They’re Dicks. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
morzer
@Little Boots:
Right. These people don’t care about deficits when the GOP is in power, and they don’t have a clue about where they came from or what might be a realistic way of dealing with them. The same goes for the Constitution.
Tattoosydney
@NR:
@aliasofwestgate:
And, get this, competition and a bit of regulation actually ensures that private insurance companies’ prices and polices are reasonable. Who would have thunk it?
I pay 1.5% of my taxable income to the government, and I can either take out health insurance (which costs me $121 a month for gold cover that covers almost everything, including gym shoes and glasses) or if I don’t take out the insurance pay an additional 1% tax if my income is over $73,000 per year.
I can walk into any hospital in Australia and almost any GP practice in Australia and get treatment and not end up paying a cent. If I need medicine, it usually costs about $10 dollars.
It’s horrible.
Little Boots
@morzer:
It’s actually a little maddening. It’s just politics, and in a way we all get that, but still, can we have a real discussion about our real country and its real problems, please? Why is that so impossible?
Tattoosydney
@Tattoosydney:
Linky.
MikeJ
@Tattoosydney: And one thing I always point out to people is that lawsuits for personal injuries will probably go down. I’ve a friend in London who was hit while riding his bike. The thought of suing never crossed his mind, mainly because he had £0.00 in medical bills.
In the US even if you are insured and even if you are not the cause of your treatment, you’re probably going to go bankrupt.
morzer
@Little Boots:
Because the minute facts start to matter, the GOP might as well be lying in its coffin. They’ve got nothing to offer, except to bitter, frightened, selfish old white people.
Tattoosydney
I note that those amounts are in addition to regular income tax, and our tax rates are higher than yours, but then we have this odd idea over here that government should provide roads and affordable schooling.
Little Boots
@morzer:
but you know, we all have to answer that question. what do we want to do, right now, with this country as we find it? what are the biggest problems? How do we solve them?
I so rarely hear real answers to any of those questions.
kdaug
@Little Boots: Because, Lil’ Boots, the Rapture is coming and our military is going to bring us all to Jebus.
I’m not sure how this squares with the fact that so many brown people are devout Christians, but I’m sure it does, somehow. (I think it’s a Catholic v. Evangelical thing, but I’m not clear on the distinctions).
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney: We can’t have nice things like this because, again, of history. During the First Gilded Age sociallist elements in the US demonstrated to often violent ends, which caused a lot of resentment to Communist ideas like universal health care. Not to mention its founding under German kaisers didn’t help much either. After FDR decided to go for Social Security over a national health care plan WWII happened. Then the Soviets got the bomb and this little thing called the Cold War took over. I’m honestly amazed Nixon even tried since he was so fervently anti-Communist. And of course we had Saint Ronnie for eight years so the idea of doing anything that MIGHT help brown or poor folk went out the window. Then Clinton took a turn at it, and no way was Dubya even gonna come close. I guess it really does take a black man to set us right.
Tattoosydney
@MikeJ:
Or even no fault accident injury compensation for the entire population. Admittedly it’s New Zealand and their population is small, but it can be done.
Xenos
@MikeJ: It really is the most useful and effective version of tort reform. The really big awards tend to be given where a child needs 80 years of 24 hour care, and can never qualify for insurance of their own. If that child received medical care as a matter of course then the question of what to do with, for example, an incompetent obstetrician, becomes a matter of enforcing professional standards.
This point is completely lost on my friends who are physicians, though. Low taxes trumps everything else in their moral universe. Which is why I do not go to them for treatment.
morzer
@Little Boots:
Hmmm rebuild our infrastructure, radically reform education, tackle global warming realistically, tax the rich and corporations so that they pay their share, break up cartels and monopolies….
Violet
@kdaug:
When they get to heaven, all those white evangelicals are still going to need people to mow their cloud lawns and clean their cloud houses and pick up the trash left at the curb on the streets paved with gold. That’s why brown people get to go to heaven too.
Okay I’m going to stop now. I’m making myself ill with my parody of a white evangelical teabagger type.
Little Boots
seriously, what do you all want to do?
Here’s what I want: I want universal, truly universal health care. I want all the troops brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan, even knowing thins will get even uglier in both of those countries. And I want to say, fuck the deficit, give the states the money they need, to keep every teacher, police officer, fire person employed. Those seem fairly uncomplicated, uncontroversial things to support, but they aren’t happening. Are there reasons for that? What think you?
Tattoosydney
@Yutsano:
We had a lot of that stuff too, you know, and somehow managed to come out of it not entirely fucked up. What’s your excuse?
El Cid
You might also want to recall the Second Militia Act of 1792, which had a section which required white male adult citizens to have muskets, ammunition, and other basic needs to uphold their functions as a militia — and if they didn’t have this already, to buy it out of their own pockets. And this after being forcibly conscripted into this armed service!
Militia is theft! But at least there’s a tax writeoff — hey, kind of like enrolling in an insurance plan versus a ‘mandate’!
The problem is that by since the Consitution was ratified in 1787, far too many years had passed for the tyrannical Stalinists in power in 1792 to remember what freedom was all about.
However, it might be totally different when the government mandates you to buy guns and ammo, since the highest priority of any democracy is to protect the rights of guns and ammo.
Little Boots
El Cid, I actually remember you. I remember you’re pretty bright. What do you think about where this country is headed?
MattR
@Little Boots:
@Tattoosydney:
My answer to both questions is the same – Republicans are assholes.
freelancer
@Tattoosydney:
I’ve been watching the Open and envying your weather terribly. It’s snowing 3″ here overnight.
MattR
@El Cid: They discuss this in the comments of the Ungar post that DougJ linked to where someone points out that the objections to that law were not the consitutionality of it, but the burden that it put on poor people (which eventually led to subsidies)
@Little Boots: I wish I knew.
Little Boots
@MattR:
And what do we do about that?
El Cid
@Yutsano: A national health care system regulated by the federal government was simply off the table in FDR’s time in office (and of course later) because it would have gone absolutely nowhere given the dependence of FDR’s government on Southern segregationist Democrats representatives and senators.
And it wasn’t only their numbers, but that their nearly eternal and uncontested re-elections (no Republican — i.e., those days’ non-white supremacist — parties in most of the South worth speaking of) gained the Southern politicians great seniority on committees.
They feared, probably correctly, that a consequence of a federal health care system would be the ‘equal’ treatment of blacks and whites (‘equal’ enough in their minds), and in particular federal requirements for non-racist treatment and employment. For example, that the federal government could require that a black patient be treated at a white hospital, and/or vice versa.
I can’t remember the sourcing, but apparently there were a few discussions of this within FDR’s White House, but they didn’t waste much time on it, given the likelihood that presenting such legislation in itself would have to be done in complete opposition to Southern Democratic input and would possibly have driven the Southern Democrats out of FDR’s governing majority.
Xenos
@Tattoosydney:
National Security State. Once you have one, you really can’t get rid of it. And it bankrupts the country while corrupting the public sector, the private sector, and civil society as well. The revolving door between Wall Street, the CIA/Pentagon, and the oil industry is at the center of it.
Tattoosydney
@freelancer:
Hmmm. Slightly overcast and 81 degrees (in your odd fahrenheity thingy) at 5pm here.
But you didn’t want to know that.
curious
god forbid a founding father turn one quarter of a degree in his grave so that a poor person might receive an annual check-up.
Little Boots
@El Cid:
They should have. things happen all at once or not at all.
but at least Obama did something. Not much of what I’d like, but something. And that is a hell of start, these days.
eemom
I interrupt this Serious Discussion among people who evidently have some weird form of dyslexia that causes them to confuse Saturday night with Monday morning to re-thank Purple Girl and Mnemosyne, if they’re around, for recommending The Uninvited on TCM this evening. Amazingly good movie. Cool ghostly special effects for 1944, also too.
Carry on,
freakazoidsSerious People.El Cid
@MattR: @MattR:
Exactly what I was saying. The decay of our honored Founding Father government had decayed into soshullist tyranny by 1792, chaining good white male citizens into having to buy what the government tells them too, and then buying them off like any good Marxist government would.
I’m surprised the Fedrul Gubmit didn’t hand them out pacifiers too so that the citizenry could get by a day or two without sucking on the Big Gubmit teat!
Clearly those Leninists in Congress then would have benefited from a good talking-to by the Tea Party Patriots!
Mark S.
@Tattoosydney:
Bertrand Russell, writing in the 40’s, said that American corporations were just about as powerful as the American government. They sure as hell haven’t gotten less powerful in the last 70 years.
We also have an incredible number of dipshits in this country, way more than our fair share, who elect people like Gohmert (sp.? too lazy to look it up) and Bachmann.
Little Boots
@El Cid:
And, so …
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney: Just out f curiosity, was there an Australian equivalent to Joseph McCarthy? A lot of Communist paranoia came to major head after his reign of terror. Plus what El Cid says: anything that could even be perceived as helping out brown folk was verboten for a very long time.
Mark S.
@eemom:
Hey, it’s Very Serious People.
Little Boots
@Mark S.:
here? serious? let’s put a stop to that!
Little Boots
there is a new thread. just saying.
hilts
@Mark S.:
Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, and Steve King are all escapees from the same mental hospital.
Tattoosydney
@Mark S.:
We have our fair share of corporate control of government and dickhead politicians too. It just seems you have a lot more crazy than we do.
I’ve always suspected (and I don’t claim it’s an original thought) that it all boils down to us being descended from criminals and their guards, rather than from slave owning Puritans.
/knows he is simplifying horribly
Tattoosydney
@Yutsano:
We had our “reds under the beds” scares, with the Liberal (read conservative) Party using the red menace to keep power for the entirety of the 50s and 60s, and even Labor politicians (1) strike breaking to beat off the communists.
However, there wasn’t an equivalent of McCarthy by any means. Australian in the 50s and 60s may have been scared and stultifyingly dull, but it wasn’t particularly dangerous or loopy.
We had a long tradition of unionisation and of labor governments, so I suspect even the scary 50s were much less scary over here.
Our bright shining spot of that century is the White Australia Policy – devoted to keeping out the darkies by making them take language tests in languages they couldn’t speak.
(1) But look at that list of achievements – “the post-war immigration scheme, the establishment of Australian citizenship in 1949, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, over-viewing the foundation of airlines Qantas and TAA, improvements in social services, the creation of the Commonwealth Employment Service, the introduction of federal funds to the States for public housing construction, the establishment of a Universities Commission for the expansion of university education, the introduction of a Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and free hospital ward treatment, reorganising and enlarging the CSIRO, and the founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). One of the few successful referendums to modify the Australian Constitution, the 1946 Social Services referendum, took place during his term.”
What a politician.
Common Sense
Wouldn’t privatizing Social Security be unconstitutional if the Supremes declared that the government cannot make one pay money to a private entity? Seems like the only constitutionally valid health care system would be one where you pay taxes and receive health care back. A single payer system in other words. Do these idiots ever think about what the result of their argument would be?
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney:
I wonder if this is also a part of the major differences. We came from a period where status based mostly on race was stratified and even legally codified, so much so we fought a war with each other over possibly changing that. Because so many of the national health insurance plans covered everyone, the opposition to anything that would help anyone besides whites was beyond the pale. Look at how Social Security started; it originally blocked farmers, pretty much any non-white candidate, and was heavily biased towards men. Only subsequent law changes altered that basic structure. Also consider the sociallists in the US also allied themselves with civil rights leaders of their eras. It’s a potent mix of both racism and anti-Communist paranoia. I wish now Kennedy hadn’t been such a stubborn ass about Nixon’s plan, otherwise we’d be discussing improving things like we discuss Medicare as a fact of life rather than the legality of a new law passed by a non-white President.
Tattoosydney
@Yutsano:
We, of course, just ignored our aboriginal population, when weren’t shooting them, killing them with disease or taking their children away for their own good.
Australia was whitey white white for all intents and purposes until the 40s and 50s when such exotica as Greeks and Poles were seen by some as dangerous outsiders who might want to take our jobs, just like the Vietnamese, Lebanese and Chinese who followed them over the decades.
Since that time, we’ve become pretty good at taking in other cultures, but for most of our history we haven’t had the division between at least two major race groups that you have always had.
S. cerevisiae
@Little Boots: I’m not as sharp as El Cid, but my guess is something combining Soylent Green, Mad Max and The Road.
NR
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
And this example is invalid for that, because there is a night and day difference between requiring people to pay taxes to the government in exchange for government services, and forcing people to give money to private corporations that take a big chunk of that money for profits. The fact that the founding fathers were okay with the former does not mean that they would be okay with the latter.
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney:
That interests me, mostly because by the late 1800’s the US had large Asian populations in the West. I would think they would want to stay closer to home but from the sounds of things Australian immigrant policy wasn’t exactly friendly. Ours wasn’t much better, but they did at least get a toe hold.
We more or less did the same thing. In fact we have shared sins in the way both our countries treated our native populations. The big divergence, and one that dominates our national discourse to this day, is the fact that we brought in a whole population of human beings for the exclusive usage of exploitation of labour. We honestly are still dealing with the repercussions of treating humans like cattle simply based upon their skin colour. And then when that institution ended, we treated them horribly for over a hundred years until finally a few white guys woke up. Since then our national discourse has been fractured, but it actually does get better. Our young’uns are learning to see beyond colour lines much better than even my generation is. It will reach a point where race will be barely a secondary consideration, but most likely not in our lifetimes. And as long as we have older folks clinging to their ideas of how the world should be, we will have to take the start Obama got us and move up from there. I’m still of the opinion we’ll get to where you guys are eventually when it comes to health care, but it’ll be a constant struggle.
El Cid
@Little Boots: They should have in one moral sense.
There are a lot of reasons why such national health care plans didn’t emerge from FDR, likely to be included in Social Security. Lobbying, anti-‘Communist’ “Liberty League” anti-government anti-New Deal analogues of the Tea Parties, and so on and so forth. They feared that continuing the battles over national health care (they really had tried) would block the passage of Social Security itself.
Hell, there was a constant Tea Party-style freakout about Roosevelt’s formation of the Committee on Economic Security to draft in quick fashion the various New Deal programs, you know, as the totalitarian 5 year plan of the Soviets and Reds and blah blah blah blah blah.
For what it’s worth, here’s FDR’s 1939 message to Congress on ‘the National Health Program.’
The administration seemed to be doing what it could to push things along, given the wall-like resistance it knew it would be facing. Establishing a commission of experts to review the issue and make a recommendation; bringing together Congressional hearings, draft legislation, coming up with complicated plan designs much like what was just passed.
Here’s a mention of that in the 1939 message:
Had national health care reform been passed under FDR, it’s very likely that it would have been the sort of system referenced above — very little direct federal intervention, no national single payer plan, and complex coordination with state and local governments with subsidies — again, in part to try to get around the absolute opposition of Southern Democrats.
Who would later kill all such bills by voting with Republicans.
You can’t put too many links in one post, but if you Google things like the “Technical Committee on Medical Care”, “The Report on the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care,” you’ll find all these 1930s documents on the NIH website.
That Report was actually an expert report backed by foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegies, etc) presented in 1932. Here’s a sample from the published summary of the Report just to give the flavor of the time. Note the Tea Party stench wafting out from the AMA (via its publication JAMA):
So, on the one side you have a group proposing something like some sort of subsidized large scale insurance scheme — remember, back then, very few people had medical insurance. That’s largely what’s meant by “organized groups”. You know, like Blue Cross / Blue Shield when it was a non-profit, or various union plans.
On the other side you’ve got the lobby for the most wealthy doctors screaming about ‘all power to the Soviets’ and such.
So take your pick. Maybe FDR tried as hard as he could. Maybe he feared too much that including health care in with Social Security would have led to the failure of Social Security to pass, which it would have, but that it might have been worth it. Maybe he and other leading non-Southern Democrats didn’t care that much about it.
They seemed to really give a damn given all the aid they did give to states for basic public health and even trying to build hospitals (and that too got knocked down).
There wasn’t much “New Deal” after the first couple of years, and the “New Deal II” known as “WWII” came a bit later. In 1937 there was the recession caused in part by the new “deficit hawks” of that day, to whom FDR listened, and then in ’38 Democrats lost a shitload of seats.
SSI passed in 1935, and had it taken a few years longer, it probably wouldn’t have passed.
I don’t know what to judge, exactly. New Deal programs were designed to leave out blacks when it would be a major issue in the South — i.e., exempting agricultural workers from worker protections and aid. On the other hand, blacks were getting work in industries including military production.
I’m still inclined to say that there was very little chance of getting national health care passed under FDR, certainly not early on, but then maybe it just always looks like that until it gets done.
Tattoosydney
Moderation
Tattoosydney
Reposting due to moderation because I mentioned a bad word.
@Yutsano:
We had different ethnic groups – there were people of African descent on the First Fleet, and there were a lot of Chinese immigrants during our gold rush – but the numbers were always small. A friend of mine went to school with a guy who was of Chinese background, but who had the strongest Aussie accent I have ever heard. His family had been here as long as mine.
True. However, you treated your native population as enemy combatants (simplifying horribly again), whereas our aboriginal population were almost literally nonexistent. Thus, some of yours at least eventually got ca5ino5, whereas ours get grinding poverty for the most part.
I agree with the remainder of your post.
Yutsano
@Tattoosydney:
It’s funny you should say that. There are a lot of tribes up around where I live, and every single major band has a house of games. (FYWP for that awkward word construction.) And they all seem to be rather successful as sources of entertainment and income for the various tribal members. There are just as many that live in very similar squalor as your aboriginal bands. It’s tragic, and there seems to be no political will to fix the situation. And the last Native leader who tried to make a ruckus about it got murdered by the FBI.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Ditto this. We have reservations in MN, and the grinding poverty and hopelessness is not pretty (gross simplification).
@Little Boots: I pretty much want what you want, too. However, I am an a loss as to how to make that shit happen.
I’m going to say something radical: I am not a strict Constitutionalist at all. The Founding Fathers, in their wildest dreams, couldn’t have imagined the shit that would go on two hundred years in the future. They were men. White men. Slave-owning white men. Why would I take their word to be gospel any more than I would, well, the Bible?
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
In fact, when you consider that the ability to amend the Constitution is baked into it, in article V, it’s pretty clear that the Founding Fathers didn’t see their work as perfect or immutable either.
bob h
Conservatives are braying about the Commerce clause, but according to some law professor interviewed on NPR, it is the Necessary and Proper clause that gives the government all the authority it needs here.
El Cid
@morzer: The only Amendments which really count are the 2nd and 10th. We don’t need most of Article 1, either, because we don’t need a Congress passing all these laws because all we need to do is keep reading the Constitution over and over.
Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I’d like to point out for the record that John Adams was a Godless commie. I bet Karl Marx got all his ideas from Adams. Also too, “Vladimir Lenin” is an anagram of “John Adams” if you’ve dropped acid from a tab made from a page of Friedrich Hayek.
AxelFoley
@Little Boots:
Funny thing, this. They weren’t considered heroes in their time. In fact, at times they were reviled. They were revered well after their time in office or their deaths.
Let’s give President Obama’s status as hero a wait-see, ok?
JR
@Bill Murray: That’s actually the problem with this argument. The same Founding Fathers who passed the law being cited had just TWO DAYS EARLIER passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The myth that this old law should shatter is not that health care is unconstitutional, but that the original Tea Partiers had a singular “right” interpretation of the Constitution.
DougW
@rootless_e: You don’t say!
DougW
@Little Boots: Any court with a Republican DA?