After last week’s failure of the “Stop Me Before I Spend Again” SOTU speech by The Won, the left went all out to smear anyone and anything they could find that disagreed with his policies in order to deflect from his ineptitude.
Thankfully, most of this nonsense was washed under the standard news cycle by the uprising in Egypt. And, unsurprisingly to anyone here, the uprising in Egypt will be one of the final nails in the coffin that represents the adroitness of the Obama Administration.
This short series will dispel these silly notions that most folks you will come up against in future discussions with folks on the left (aka: The Sinestra) so that you can quickly get past these straw men and get down to the part of the discussion the Sinestra hate: The facts.
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The Act was written and passed by Congress and then signed by John Adams in 1798. It required privately employed sailors and seamen who had participated in international commercial transport to submit to a $0.20 per month (approximately 1%) payroll tax to the federal government so that a “Marine Hospital Service” could be established in the nation’s larger commercial ports.
This, per the folks on the left, is PROOF POSITIVE that the Founding Fathers were in favor of socialized medicine.
Please, stop laughing. They’re serious.
They ignore the fact that there is a very specific non-mention of sailors and seamen who engaged in domestic shipping, because the Congress knew they could only do this under their powers to regulate maritime activity and international commerce.
They also ignore that the majority of these hospitals were owned and operated by the US Government and staffed by US military personnel. The private hospitals that were contracted by the US Government at the outset of the program were soon replaced by military staffed hospitals.
Furthermore, and most importantly, they ignore that, despite repeated tax increases, the funding was completely inadequate to fund this service and that funding had to borrowed.
You will recognize the Merchant Hospital Service today as the Public Health Service, encompassing the cabinet level Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control.
Now that is what I call Mission Creep.
“This, per the folks on the left, is PROOF POSITIVE that the Founding Fathers were in favor of socialized medicine.”
No, it’s proof positive that the HMO concept was thought of back then, that’s all. To stretch that out to today’s collectivist concept of socialized medicine is an inferential leap of monster proportions.