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Home » HCR: repeal and replace

HCR: repeal and replace

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m glad to see that Republicans are busy strategizing how to repeal Obamacare after the 2012 elections. I hope they aren’t assuming that Republicans will have to win both Congress and the White House in order for that to occur, because I believe there is grave doubt about both but especially the latter.

I’m also glad to see that the “replace” part of the equation is not being neglected:

Other conservative healthcare experts are developing an alternative to the law, an effort that could protect Republicans from past critiques that their healthcare plans left tens of millions of Americans without medical coverage.

“The window for action comes and goes,” said Tom Miller, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, one of several conservative groups involved in the effort. “We need to be ready.”

When Republicans were (briefly) in charge of both the presidency and Congress, they should have tried harder to put their own solutions in place. If they had succeeded (and it is unclear whether they would have), the HCR debacle might have been pre-empted.

Contrary to leftist rhetoric, Republicans do not thirst for the deaths of granny or the poor; the problem is that there is no free—or even inexpensive—health care lunch. From now on, Republicans had better be a lot more smart than in the past, and a lot more focused. But if health care insurance reform had been easy to design without massive expense, it would have been accomplished a lot sooner.

Comments

HCR: repeal and replace — 32 Comments

  1. Other than perhaps a federal law allowing insurance companies to sell the same policies across state lines, I don’t know you would “replace” Obamacare with.

    Conservatives don’t believe in mandates of this sort; it’s not the proper role of the federal government.

    I could see a “replace” that consists of stripping away other laws and regulations that impede the liberty of individuals to purchase health insurance for themselves, but that’s about it.

  2. “When Republicans were (briefly) in charge of both the presidency and Congress, they should have tried harder to put their own solutions in place. If they had succeeded (and it is unclear whether they would have) . . . ”

    Such as when the Republicans (in charge of both the presidency and Congress) tried to reform social security. Yes. Quite unclear. Granny eating cat food and all that.

  3. Barring the SCOTUS tossing the entire law out, the Republicans will need to win majorities in both the Senate and the house and also win the presidency to repeal ObamaCare.

    I’m curious as to why you “believe there is grave doubt about both, but especially the latter”.

    Several Senate seats look pretty good as Republican pickup and Obama is a wounded candidate. While there is a long time to November 2012, at this point things look pretty good for the Republicans to hold the house, take the Senate and the WH.

    If today I had to make a call on the outcome I’d say the Republicans pick up 7 or 8 Senate seats and the presidency.

  4. Dear Jean, I’m glad you are still soldiering on. I pretty much deserted my blog because I just couldn’t stand writing every day that we were ruled by an evil person who was intent upon undoing everything which made this country a miracle among nations.

    However, from both a strategic and a tactical side I must demur. I don’t think Obamacare can be repealed. There were some pretty smart proggies involved in its unholy gestation and there are probably years worth of challenges ahead to any attempt to undo.

    So – instead of undoing how about passing ANOTHER law which reaffirms, as did O and his minions time and time again, that if you like your health insurance you can keep it? I seem to recall that being a feature, no? That knocks the legs out from under IPAB.

    Kind of a judo thing. turn its overweening techno-certainty against it.

  5. Why does the government have to do anything about healthcare to begin with? I really don’t get it. Why can’t people just buy medical insurance if they want it or not buy if they don’t? If you can’t afford med ins then go to the free clinic, there are lots of them around.

  6. 1. I hope they aren’t assuming that Republicans will have to win both Congress and the White House in order for that to occur, because I believe there is grave doubt about both but especially the latter.

    Agreed. I’ve typed before and will type again that it takes something close to a perfect storm to remove an incumbent President. Intrade’s Presidential odds tilt slightly against Obama but are basically a toss-up.

    2. M J R@October 18th, 2011 at 2:23 pm:

    IMHO Neo addressed your point with From now on, Republicans had better be a lot more smart than in the past, and a lot more focused.

    3. I’m not sure how hard Romney, if elected together with a GOP Congress, would try to repeal Obamacare. Romney strikes me as a competent version of the George Bushes, the second of whom expanded Medicare (and in effect lied to his Republican Congress about the cost).

  7. I read somewhere (? NRO) that both Romney and Santorum were planning to use reconciliation to get rid of Obamacare if they didn’t have enough senate votes. Apparently there is enough in the law that is tied to financing and thus falls under reconciliation procedures that Obamacare can be gutted one provision at a time.

  8. My greatest fear is that the replacement will be a Republican (R) originated system of care for all (Omni) by an all-caring (cough, cough), all-knowing (cough, cough, cough) government bureaucracy.

    I call this feared, fearsome HCR (Health Care Replacement): “R-Omni-Care”.

  9. Obamacare is in the process of repealing itself. The Class Act has already collapsed because it is unsustainable.The rest of Obamacare isn’t much better. The CBO cost analysis was based on gimmicks to make it look like it would reduce the deficit. The huge number of Obamacare exemptions, granted to unions and the like, undermine its viability.

    The Democrats passed Obamacare using reconciliation so they could avoid a filibuster. The GOP can use the same methods to repeal it. They may not need to win the White House to make it happen. If Obama wins but loses the house and senate big-time, Democrats will lose any willingness to stand up for its retention.

    The Tea Party has to do what it it did in 2010; put the fear of God into every back-sliding GOP Senator and Congressman that they will be primaried and replaced by conservatives.

  10. As of this writing, Intrade has the probability at 75.5% that Republicans will control the Senate. It’s not a deep market, but the people who are willing to put their money where theeir mouth is think Republicans have a good chance. At least as things stand today.

    http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=639655

    Republicans to maintain control of the House is currently at 77.5%.

    http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=639652

    As gs said, the race for the White House is a virtualy toss up, with the Republican challenger having a tiny, frog’s hair, edge.

  11. One reason that the intrade numbers for Obama have yet to crater is the fact that the Republicans have yet to select a nominee. Pretty hard to bet a race before you know who is running. Once both candidates are known you’ll see intrade move.

    It does not require a “perfect storm” to remove an incumbent president, when things are not going well. When the economy is good and people are generally happy with their lives and the direction of the nation, incumbents are pretty much impossible to beat. That is not the current situation and things are likely to continue to deteriorate.

    Since we started keeping track, no president has ever won reelection when his approval numbers were floating around 40%. Barring an almost miraculous turn about, or the most amazing stumble by the Republican, Obama is very likely to lose and possibly lose in a landslide.

  13. UncleFred, good points but I suppose you were playing it safe by suggesting Obama could lose in a landslide rather than he WILL lose in a landslide. I suspect there is a very good change he will lose PA, NM, NV, NH, ME and CO. That would give A Repub 314 to Obama’s 224. Considering, as discussed here at neo, rock bottom for any President seems to be 35% and since Obama’s Gallup is now at 38% the game seems pretty much up.

  14. The real problem with healthcare is that there is no price competition at point of service. That’s due to government intervention, mostly the tax code that encourages employeer provided insurance, but also medicare and mediciad.

    Fixing healthcare is politically infeasable; it certainly was several years ago when Bush was in office. Bush’s “Part D” plan was the $400B counter to the Democrats $800B to $900B (over ten years, per the CBO).

    The fact is Bush put forward a rather moderate approach. While he pissed conservatives and libertarians off in doing so, realistically the conservative and libertarian approach was simply not a starter.

    The reality is that routine healthcare should not be paid for by insurance. Insurance makes sense only for high cost but relatively uncommon events. It might make sense for catastrophic types of care or long term care, but not typical doctor visits.

  15. Selling policies across state lines is a phantom cure.
    When I was in the business, a company I used sold policies in, iirc, seventeen states. Other companies did the same, deciding if the business climate justified opening in one state or another.
    So if you buy a policy in Michigan from Company X, and you could buy it in Arizona from Company X, what’s the big deal?
    Only consideration is that most private insurers charged premium rates that differed by overall local medical costs. So in the counties surrounding a big city, the rates are high because the costs are high. Live outstate where the costs are lower and the premium will be lower.
    Across state lines: I must be missing something.

  16. Whole life health insurance. You pay for premiums for yourself with a portion going to a health savings account. Over time, that accumulates and your premium goes down as your HSA goes up. Also pay for premiums for when you can’t afford to pay- insurance for insurance. Voila! Holmes fixes it all!

  17. The Trent Lott Republican years were some of the most wasted in our history. They really were a revisitation of the know-nothing party.

  19. If Obamacare can’t be repealed, then replace it.

    Some suggestions:
    !. Medical malpractice tort reform.
    2. Level playing field for purchasing insurance. Give everyone the same tax break that employers get now for providing insurance.
    3. Make high deductibles attractive.
    3. Increase low cost clinics where Medicaid and other low income patients can get care.
    4. The really biggie. Repeal the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986 that ensures public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay. That would drive most people to get at least catastrophic health insurance and would no longer require that illegal immigrants be treated. (A magnet for illegals.) This would relieve a lot of the cost shifting that occurs under the present law. (I know, I know, it’s tough. We managed okay until 1986. IIRC 1986 was when all medical costs started to rise more rapidly.)
    5. Increase premiums for Medicare (presently $96/mo. – a lot of people don’t know that Medicare recipients pay an annual premium now.) and raise co-pays.
    6. Block grant Medicaid funds to the states.
    7. Encourage Medical Savings accounts.
    I would call it the Personal Responsibility Medical Reform Act.

  20. “…the HCR debacle might have been pre-empted”

    Haven’t the Democrats been dreaming of universal health care for decades? I doubt there’s anything that Republicans could have done to shake them from this goal (not that this excuses their wasted opportunity to do so).

    Now that’s it’s here, I imagine it will be near impossible to repeal – which is why the next president & congress must be willing to repeal all of it instead of trying to fix it.

  21. If the Republicans want to repeal Obamacare, they must not only win the Presidency, the Senate and the House, they must do so in truly historic landslide fashion.

    You need 60 votes in the Senate to force a vote on anything. However, the Republican party has numerous RINOs in the Senate and will get more. So in practice the Senate Republicans probably need something like 67 to 70 votes.

    And a willing President. Would Romney, the most likely Republican President, support repeal?

    Some sort of modification to Obamacare is likely even if Obama is reelected, but repeal by legislation is impossible.

    Remember, the House, dominated by Republicans, could not repeal the 100W light bulb ban.

  22. @bob sykes: Obamacare was passed using reconciliation and other tricks to avoid a filibuster. It can be repealed the same way. The Democrats won’t be able to cry foul, and those that are left probably won’t want to. Our main task is to replace Progressive republicans with Conservative Republicans.

  23. In the Soviet Union, the preferred term was “socialist medicine”; the Russian language has no term to distinguish between “socialist” and “socialized”

    Russia in Soviet times (between 1917 and the early 1990s) had a totally socialist model of health care with a centralised, integrated, hierarchically organised with the government providing free health care to all citizens. Initially successful at combating infectious diseases, the effectiveness of the socialized model declined with underinvestment. Despite a doubling in the number of hospital beds and doctors per capita between 1950 and 1980, the quality of care began to decline by the early 1980s and medical care and health outcomes were below western standards.

    But now we have to be equal with them!!!

    (what? did you think that they around the world would allow the improvements and things to be equal with us? no no… that is not how Procrustes works (ever)!!!)

    The new mixed economy Russia has switched to a mixed model of health care with private financing and provision running alongside state financing and provision. The OECD reported that unfortunately, none of this has worked out as planned and the reforms have in many respects made the system worse.

    The population’s health has deteriorated on virtually every measure. The resulting system is overly complex and very inefficient. It has little in common with the model envisaged by the reformers. Although there are more than 300 private insurers and numerous public ones in the market, real competition for patients is rare leaving most patients with little or no effective choice of insurer, and in many places, no choice of health care provider either. The insurance companies have failed to develop as active, informed purchasers of health care services. Most are passive intermediaries, making money by simply channelling funds from regional OMS funds to healthcare providers.

    We copy them on health…
    How’s that GOING to work out?

    well, just see where COPYING free love, no fault divorce, our educational system, the newspaper serving the state, the abolishment of religion and so on has brought us?

    To freedom or soviet living?

    Joseph Stalin
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

    Under the Soviet government people benefited from some social liberalization. Girls were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment improving lives for women and families.

    Is that the truth? Or is that Pravda?
    are women and families better off than when they were farmers under the czar? not really… as it takes parents AND grandparents to raise a kid there, and your life expectancy is low… (58)… alcoholism is rampant as we are discovering here with welfare, and economy.

    Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which significantly increased the lifespan and quality of life of the typical Soviet citizen

    really? maybe if you decide to cherry pick the best year after penicillin from the west and hygienic methods spread through the population… after that… no…

    [by the way, every one of these points on the wiki of Stalin asks for required citation. ie. people are putting up the glorious revisioned history, with no references…]

    Stalin’s policies granted the Soviet people universal access to healthcare and education, effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of typhus, cholera, and malaria. The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.

    Soviet women under Stalin were the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital, with access to prenatal care. Education was also an example of an increase in standard of living after economic development. The generation born during Stalin’s rule was the first near-universally literate generation. Millions benefitted from mass literacy campaigns in the 1930s, and from workers training schemes. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract Transport links were improved and many new railways built. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work; they could afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet economy.

    see… it was so wonderful. and the US collapsed its economy, and now its collapsing ours… (tit for tat)

    what they don’t say up there is that forced abortions, death camps, forced labor, murders, state usage of medicine as a weapon, no real products, no product safety, and more was in all that wonderfulness….

    WE COPIED AND ARE COPYING THAT…

    and what explains the situation we are in?

    Moshe the Beadle
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_%28book%29

    In Night, everything is inverted, every value destroyed. “Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends,” a Kapo tells him. “Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.”

    “A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York, Random House, 1952), p.806

    Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (“And the World Remained Silent”) – Elie Wiesel

    Night is the first book in a trilogy–Night, Dawn, and Day… “In Night,” he said, “I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end–man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night.”

    “Jews, listen to me! It’s all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!”

    The cattle train crossed the border into Poland, he tells them, where it was taken over by the Gestapo, the German secret police. The Jews were transferred to lorries and driven to a forest in Galicia, near Kolomaye, where they were forced to dig pits. When they had finished, each prisoner had to approach the hole, present his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. Moshe tells them about Malka, the young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed before his sons; and how he, Moshe, was shot in the leg and taken for dead. But the Jews of Sighet would not listen, making Moshe Night’s first unheeded witness.

    Witness the défaite du moi
    and not even know what that means historically as if its fresh and new and we are witness to the first dawn

    how much the same?
    is Rev. Jim Wallis our Bishop Mueller

    Does the healthcare bill and its “rationing” which will happen along the lines of the protected classes vs the unprotected classes, or the volk vs the oppressors… resemble other laws and times when such was done?

    we cant expect it to be a copy… and so its infantile to require an exact copy before one believes that its the same… ie, unless you see a short Austrian fellow leading the crowd, and know his name is not Charlie Chaplain, and he is sporting a funky tiny mustache. nothing can be the same… right?

    diversity, the idea of focusing on differences, makes sure we refuse to see similarities.

    its interesting “action for healthcare”

    and Googles very helpful in blocking you from finding things…

    after healthcare was nationalized, then came Aktion T4…

    …was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany’s eugenics-based “euthanasia” program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were “judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination”. The program officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but it continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

    then this

    The ideas of social Darwinism were widespread in all western countries in the early 20th century, and the eugenics movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the United States. The idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary antisocial behaviour was widely accepted, and was put into law in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. For example, between 1935 and 1975, 63,000 people were sterilised on eugenic grounds in Sweden.

    but note… take away the specifics, and see the system… ie, the state declares the actions in medicine… and so, redistributes outcomes from some classes to other classes where the bureaucracy decides, and can make exceptions when it feels like it for its own purposes (like the bribery of key people by not subjecting them to the same system)

    today, you have a protected class dialectic. not only that but its the same division for other justifications as before…

    the state is dismantling alternative power structures, from religion, to the dynasty of capitalism (Judeo christian thought – as under this system they are synonymous to all but the useful idiots)…

    Why We Must Ration Health Care
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?pagewanted=all

    Notice that like the pseudo moral argument in the thread as to the isreali release of prisoners for one man…

    the whole of these arguments pit ACTUALITY of now, against an infinite selection of future potentials, that may or may not every happen the way they say, or if so, will not happen that way forever.

    [edited for length by n-n]

  24. i guess if one cares not to read bout Muenzenberg, then Otto Katz is probably out too….

    ‘Have I ever told you that you are considered by many, myself included, the best journalist in the world?’

    ‘Often, when you wanted to get something for nothing out of me.’

    ‘Well, what I want now is a tip-top, smashing, eye-witness account of the great anti-Franco revolt which occurred yesterday at Tetuan, the news of it having been hitherto suppressed by censorship.’

    I said I had never been to Tetuan and knew of no revolt there.

    ‘Not the point at all,’ he said impatiently. ‘Nor have I heard of any such thing.’ The point, he explained, was that a crucial moment had been reached in the supply of arms to the battling Spanish Republicans.

    just as WAR was really not about an american arms dealer but about victor bout…

    well, wag the dog, was really telling the story of Otto Katz…

    and Otto developed all the kinds of things we have now in msm that confuses us and directs us…

    there seems nothing risible in the spectacle of a man firing off his propaganda-lies as, one presumes, effectively as he knows how, but keeping his conscience clear by ‘detesting’ his own activities.
    After all, if he does not think the cause for which he is fighting is worth lying for, he does not have to lie at all, any more than the man who sincerely feels that killing is murder is forced to shoot at those enemy soldiers.
    He can become a conscientious objector, or run away. ‘Paris vaut bien une messe,’ and I do not recall that Henry of Navarre ever claimed that he had detested his own ‘cynical’ behaviour.

  25. The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.

    According to the second edition (1989) of the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known usage of the word “racism” in English occurred in a 1936 book by the American “fascist,” Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism. The second usage of the term in English that the Oxford English Dictionaryrecords is in the title of a book originally written in German in 1933 and 1934 but translated into English and first published in 1938 — Racism by Magnus Hirschfeld, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Since Hirschfeld died in 1935, before the publication of Dennis’ book the following year, and had already used the word extensively in the text and title of his own book, it seems only fair to recognize him rather than Dennis as the originator of the word “racism.” In the case of the word “racist” as an adjective, the Oxford English Dictionary ascribes the first known usage to Hirschfeld himself. Who was Magnus Hirschfeld and what did he have to tell us about “racism”?

    and

    Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German-Jewish medical scientist whose major work was in the field of what came to be known as “sexology” — the scientific study of sex. Like Havelock Ellis in England and Alfred Kinsey in the United States, Hirschfeld was not only among the first to collect systematic information about sexuality but also was an apostle of sexual “liberation.”

    His major work was a study of homosexuality, but he also published many other books, monographs, and articles dealing with sex. He wrote a five-volume treatise on “sexology” as well as some 150 other works and helped write and produce five films on the subject.

    It is fair to say that his works were intended to send a message — that traditional Christian and bourgeois sexual morality was repressive, irrational, and hypocritical, and that emancipation would be a major step forward. His admiring translators, Eden and Cedar Paul, in their introduction to Racism, write of his “unwearying championship of the cause of persons who, because their sexual hormonic functioning is of an unusual type, are persecuted by their more fortunate fellow-mortals.” Long before the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, Magnus Hirschfeld was crusading for the “normalization” of homosexuality and other abnormal sexual behavior.

    of course… everyone pretty much is completey in the dark as far as relating the sex communes of harmon, the sex debasement of germans and the sexual revolution in the US…

    anyone want to make up a reason why?

    anyway… he did NOT like the nazis…
    and he was not a nazi… (he had to flee to france at the same time the frankfurt school fled to columbia university in the USA)

    Curiously, he never cites the work of Franz Boas and his disciples against “racism,” though that work was available in Europe at the time, nor does he invoke the ideas of the Frankfurt School, though Hirschfeld’s own claim that “racism” is rooted in fear, loss of self-esteem, and other social and psychological pathologies resembles the ideas the Frankfurt School was formulating.

    Hirschfeld describes his own political ideals as “Pan-Humanism,” a version of political, cultural, and racial universalism. The Pauls themselves write, “we think that the readers of Racism will detect a very definite orientation to the Left… [Hirschfeld] was one who fully realized that sexual reform is impossible without a preliminary economic and political revolution.”

    ah.. so the idea that women and feminists would never truly be free under capitalism but have to make a communist state to achieve their supposed ends… came from a lineage of thought… a thought the true believers and followers know, but the common man who is a pawn does not…

    (nor does he not want to be a pawn, for the COST of that is to study!!!! and not just what they recommend)

    In Racism, Hirschfeld offers what is essentially a definition of “Pan-Humanism”: “The individual, however close the ties of neighborhood, companionship, family, a common lot, language, education, and the environment of nation and country, can find only one dependable unity within which to seek a permanent spiritual kinship — that of humanity-at-large, that of the whole human race.” With one exception, he is unsparing in his denunciations of the ethnocentric loyalties of nations, races, and cultures: “Always and everywhere, except in Soviet Russia, xenophobia, xenophobia, xenophobia.” Later, he informs us, “It may be too early to speak, but perhaps the problem of nationalities and races has already been solved on one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe [i.e., Stalin’s Russia].”

    understanding the origins of the word “racism” in Hirschfeld’s polemic also makes clear the uselessness of the word for any other purpose.

    No one seems ever to have used the word to describe his own ideas or ideas with which he agrees; its only application has been by the enemies of the ideas it purports to describe, and hence it has no objective meaning apart from its polemical usage.

    If no one calls his own ideas “racism” and its only application is to a body of ideas considered to be untrue and evil, then it has no use other than as a kind of fancy curse word, the purpose of which is simply to demonize anyone who expresses the ideas it is supposed to describe.

    IE… racism never had a real meaning other than as a pejorative of others actions…

    a game with no meaning but seems to

    a game that once you sign on to that meaning, without noticing, you also sign on to what? medical rationing? abuse of psychiatry, media, etc?

  26. Lawrence Dennis
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Dennis

    Lawrence Dennis was an mixed raced American diplomat, consultant and author. He advocated Socialist fascism in America after the Great Depression, arguing that capitalism was doomed

    now, where have we had a mixed race person who commands racism as a thing, and then used it for political advantage siding with protesters arguing that capitalism is doomed and has to end?

    Can anyone figure that one out?
    how many here have even heard of these people i mention?

    Following a notable career as a child evangelist, he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy and then to Harvard.

    oh.. and went to Harvard too..

    well, here is a comment from a blog in 2008 from the fellow traverlers.

    November 25, 2008

    However, Obama could be a new version, mutatis mutandis, of the diplomat, author, and political and economic analyst, Lawrence Dennis. Dennis, an Exeter and Harvard alumnus was a métisse who passed for white and never revealed his African roots until his mid-sixties. After writing important and revealing books following each FDR’s presidential campaign (Is Capitalism Doomed?, The Coming American Fascism, and The Dynamics of War and Revolution) and facing a trial for sedition in 1944, he relegated himself to a very small periodical publication (the Weekly Foreign Letter and the Appeal to Reason). and a mediocre life. Once a famous commentator and panelist in university conferences and radio programs, because of the 1944 Great Sedition Trial, he was reduced to oblivion, notwithstanding Time’s definition of him as “US fascism’s no. 1 intellectual” (Time Magazine, May 1, 1944).

    Nowadays, his ideas on the looming American Fascism might become of interest, because of Obama’s state intervention programs to salvage the national economy, and limit the US interventionism around the world. Obama’s future foreign policy, could, at best, choose the multilateralism option, at worst that of isolationism. The American Third or Lib-Lab Way of a “concerto” of forces among capital, the work force, the middle class, the Federal Government, and citizens, could be the solution. Dennis, inspired by Fascist corporatism, talked and wrote about it seventy years ago. Is Obama taking the baton from this man? No US newspaper dares to make such a comparison because of the “Fascist stigma.” Yet, it might be possible that this man of destiny will revolutionize his country politics and give new hope to his fellow citizens. Yes, he can.

    Mutatis mutandis is a Latin phrase meaning “by changing those things which need to be changed” or more simply “the necessary changes having been made”.

    He resigned from the foreign service in disgust at the U.S. intervention there against the Sandino rebellion. He then became an adviser to the Latin American fund of the Seligman banking trust, but again made enemies when he wrote a series of exposes of their foreign bond enterprises in The New Republic and The Nation in 1930.

    These exposes propelled Dennis into a national public intellectual career, publishing his first book at the height of the depression in 1932, Is Capitalism Doomed?.

    The book submitted that capitalism was, and by all right should be, on its death knell, but warned of the grave dangers of a world devoid of its positive legacy.

    Dennis’ two later books detailed his sense of the system that was emerging to replace it, which he believed to be a sort of Socialist fascism.

    The Coming American Fascism in 1936, detailing the system’s substructure, and The Dynamics of War and Revolution in 1940, on the superstructure.

    anyone know this?

    In 1944 he was indicted, in a group which ranged from genuine progressives to pro-Nazi agitators, in a sedition prosecution under the Smith Act which ended in a mistrial after the judge died of a heart attack

    progressives?
    Nazis?
    Social Justice?

    Familiar?

    by the way…
    OBama used to have the internationale played before he got on stage during the election… how many of you know the words?

    No more tradition’s chains shall bind us,
    Arise you slaves no more in thrall!

    The earth shall rise on new foundations
    We have been nought, we shall be all!

    ‘Tis the final conflict,
    Let each stand in his place
    The international soviet
    Shall be the human race!

    ‘Tis the final conflict,
    Let each stand in his place
    The international working class
    Shall be the human race!

    take the time to see Fulton Sheen
    “Communism and Russia”

    but if you want a interesting eye opener of a dead white guy you should know but dont..

    Dr. Martin H. Scharlemann
    openlibrary.org/authors/OL129561A/Martin_H._Scharlemann

    The ethics of revolution
    The Theology of Communism
    Toward tomorrow

    in the “theology of communism” essay he critiques “Christ Under Communism” by Milton Mayer

    “It concludes with the observation that there are, at this time, only two serious contenders for the hearts and minds of men, namely, the Church and Communism.”

    and that leads you to Nikolai Berdyaev….

    There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world. – Nikolai Berdyaev

    We shall most certainly not understand the fun dimensions of the worldwide conflict in which we are engaged if we do not reckon with those aspects of Communism which reveal it to be a product of that dark despair which overtakes men when they abandon the substance of the Christian faith but want to preserve its forms. Communism is nothing less than a theological caricature. It is a child of the Church, in the sense that it is a product of the Christian West and not of the thought of the East.

    Martin_H._Scharlemann

    there are so many names and writers and people who opposed this and so on.

    and yet no one cares enough to read or believe..

    We must always keep in mind that Communism has a doctrine of God despite the fact that it is officially atheistic. If what we put our trust in is our god–and that is a good working definition–then the god of Communism is history itself. The followers of Marx think of the historical process as a cosmic endocrine gland that secretes its own solutions as it goes along. This god is good, Marx held, since history is moving toward a noble end; namely, the creation of a classless utopia and a stateless society. The Communist is sure that he has a road map into an open future, and so he is basically optimistic. He is convinced that he is riding the wave of the future.

    On the basis of this conviction he will go to an emerging nation and try to persuade its leaders that he has the key to history and that he can show people who are caught in the revolution of rising expectations how to do a shortcut past the evils of capitalism. Pointing to Russia as exhibit “A” for this kind of revolution, he offers to show backward peoples how to move directly from feudalism into socialism as the last step before full Communism.

    We must observe at this point that Communists think of the historical process as moving along a line. This is a concept of history which Karl Marx borrowed from the Scriptures. In the ancient world it was the prophets of the Old Testament who alone among the religious exponents of that time rejected the notion that history moved in a circle. Israel’s prophets spoke of a God who had given certain promises at one time in history, which He would fulfill at some time in the future. They proclaimed a God, therefore, who had given His people both “a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11, RSV) Communism has taken over this view of what is going on in the world, thoroughly secularizing the concept in the process of adapting it to the needs of revolutionary activity.

    The prophets of old spoke of history as having a goal, the establishment of the kingdom of God. In much the same way, Communism speaks of man’s future in terms of a classless society. To be sure, it denies the existence of God as the Lord of history, displacing God with its own autonomous notion of history as that process by which men will be redeemed as they are carried forward toward the Communist order of things. The degree to which such a view of history serves as a compelling idol may be gauged from the title of a book written by André Gide and a number of other disillusioned Marxists. It is entitled The God That Failed.

    if you try to look up that book, you will find that its drowned out by other books of the same title written after it… much like the old tale of the woodcuter the dryad and the ribbons on the tree..

    André Paul Guillaume Gide en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Gide

    In 1895, after his mother’s death, he married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896, he became mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy.

    In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Frané§aise (The New French Review).

    In 1916, Marc Allégret, only 15 years old, became his lover. Marc was the son of Elie Allégret, best man at Gide’s wedding. Of Allégret’s five children, André Gide adopted Marc. The two fled to London, in retribution for which his wife burned all his correspondence, “the best part of myself,” as he was later to comment. In 1918, he met Dorothy Bussy, who was his friend for over thirty years and who would translate many of his works into English.

    ah. so a homosexual pedophile…
    Barney would have loved him, maybe literally

    anyway… if you dig to this level you will find the cliquie of the artists, and so on.. like in ny and other places… all the avante guarde of the new revolution…

    During the 1930s, he briefly became a communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveler (he never formally joined the Communist Party). As a distinguished writer sympathizing with the cause of communism, he was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of Writers. The tour disillusioned him and he subsequently became quite critical of Soviet Communism. This criticism of Communism caused him to lose socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in Retour de L’U.R.S.S. in 1936.

    so like many others… he took a tour and saw horror, and decided to come back

    but like Moshe… who would listen?
    today, whose listening?

    his quote BEFORE that visit:
    My faith in communism is like my faith in religion: it is a promise of salvation for mankind. If I have to lay my life down that it may succeed, I would do so without hesitation
    –André Gide, The God That Failed

    spoken like any young idiot today…
    AFTER that visit…

    It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief
    –André Gide, quoted in Culture, Civilization, and Humanity

    all we really had to do was fire them from the schools… but bella dodd tried to warn there too… as did iserbyte… and others..

    and today..
    everyone is afraid, but wont read what came before.. like a man wanting to do an apendectomy, but refusing to learn from the book, wanting to just hoof it themselves..

    only that deluded surgeon thinks it will work…

  28. My wife is a conservative and a healthcare practitioner. She works at a free clinic in addition to teaching; she sees it all. There are poor people who make terrible decisions… and need health care. There are working poor who try do to the right thing, but tragedy strikes. There are rich people who have unneeded first dollar coverage. There are middle class people who pay $10k premiums per year (yes, it’s subsidized, but it otherwise would be wages minus the tax subsidy), never use it…until one bad thing happens. It’s all a mess because the government runs 60% (now really 100%) of health care. The costs are hidden in insurance and it’s not really even insurance. I agree with the suggestions above for more markets…but that’s only part of the story too. People just need some access to care. If the government had a sliding scale subsidy and was actually able to say no to some things b/c it’s charity (medicaid is better insurance than most working people have)…then OK. I’m a free marketer, but that’s not to say we should leave people in the cold either. You can do both if the health service goods are bought honestly in the free market. Medicare is just price controls now which then shifts costs to the private sector and/or results in shortages.

    The Left doesn’t want to acknowledge that there is such a thing as limited resources. Controlling prices, making mandates, having “indepedent panels”, doesn’t change that. The Right needs to acknowledge that a totally free market means leaving some people without care- whether through poor planning or just bad luck. And I’m a righty/libertarian…but these concerns have to be addressed.

  29. Sorry, somewhat incoherent. My wife and I discuss these issues all of the time. Her graduate course of study basically included 3 or 4 classes that devolved into how wonderful the Affordable Care Act was, so she often argued and brought home the discussions about alternatives. Having established my wife’s authority on such topics, I proceed… 🙂

    Premiums are like paying rent. You rent into the health care service industry in this strange hybrid insurance kind of way. I’d like to see more ownership. I think that means health savings accounts. I think it could also mean my suggestion above about whole life health insurance. Basically an ever-growing health savings account that can only be used for health care (nannyish, I know). As you accrue more and more (and think of how much premium ‘rent” people waste year in and year out simply to cover other people who are sick and paying premiums…), you are really only insuring over that amount and thus the risk of insuring you drops along with the price. Imagine health care premiums being less expensive when you were older!

    But as it stands, health insurance, due to the tax subsidy, attaches to the employer and not the person. Until that changes, the kind of product above cannot exist.

  30. holmes@10:54 “The Right needs to acknowledge that a totally free market means leaving some people without care- whether through poor planning or just bad luck. And I’m a righty/libertarian…but these concerns have to be addressed.”

    Before the EMTALA in 1986 people who could not pay were treated through charitable hospitals. And most hospitals were connected to charitable organizations that helped with the indigent. Those who had resources but could not pay a humongous hospital bill, were set up with a payment plan. It worked pretty well as I recall.

    In the 30s and 40s when I was a kid, few people had insurance. It began as a benefit for workers in war industries where there were wage controls. It was a way to attract and hold good workers. It became the norm in large companies after WWII ended and was widely accepted as a wonderful thing. Individuals could buy health insurance, but the insurance companies rapidly raised the premiums on those over 60 and then dropped elderly people who became ill. The resultant “fix” was Medicare in 1964. Even then many Republicans could see it would be a financial fiasco eventually. We’ve reached that point.

    The medical-industrial complex has a need for more – money, high tech equipment, doctors, nurses, effective drugs, and so on. It is a black hole of need. The only way to ration it all is by fiat or by ability to pay. IMO, that is where the debate is going.

  31. @J.J. – True, there is a long history here and now the bill has come due. But I don’t think going back to the romantic notions of 1930’s and 40’s doctors and their little black bag and a bottle of morphine in lieu of effective treament has too much relevance today. People will get cancer and cancer treatment is expensive. Thank goodness we now have the technology to do so, however.

    And I think “ability to pay” for services in a free market is fine, but why the all or nothing approach? Why not offer some access by offering say, sliding scale vouchers for health care that is then bought in a free market? Basically food stamps for health care, only not as “one size fits all.” The main thing my wife’s free clinic patients need is mental health care. If they can break depresssion, they can work again and be productive. There’s not a lot of charitable mental health care, so the cycle continues…and these people make for expensive prisoners or wards of the state. Oh, and we live in a quasi-remote area so simply getting transportation access to health care would be a huge improvement.

    Basically, I think we do a government charity approach, only with real limitations. Private charity just won’t do it and I don’t think the population will accept it; mainly because they will project their own anxieties about not having health care themselves and being a charity case.

    Ah, well. We won’t do anything about anything until we are flat broke.

  32. holmes@0930 “The main thing my wife’s free clinic patients need is mental health care.”

    True that. My daughter is a clinical psychologist. The need for mental health treatment is huge. Unfortunately, just like the MDs, she can only handle a few low/no payers because she has overhead to cover. She is working on trying to do more group therapy for those on vouchers. (The state of Washington issues vouchers for care much like food stamps.) However, the state and insurance companies want mental health to be like a disease with a beginning, a treatment phase, and a cure. And they want it done in X number of sessions. Oh, that it was that easy.

    “Ah, well. We won’t do anything about anything until we are flat broke.” Also true.

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