BY DANNY DEGRACIA, II and LAUREN EASLEY
– For almost eight decades to the date, American people have been repeatedly under pressure from Washington D.C. to be subject to mandatory buy-in of health insurance.
On August 15, 1935 , President Franklin Roosevelt established the Interdepartmental Committee to Coordinate Health and Welfare Activities for the purpose of developing a policy framework for a new health insurance regime.
In 1939, Senator Robert Wagner of New York introduced S. 1620 which took the findings of Roosevelt ’s task force to mandate universal, compulsory health insurance.
Though S. 1620 languished and was never realized, its supporters used incremental legislation to bring America to the point at which mandatory coverage would be inescapable.
On May 22, 1964 , President Lyndon Johnson in a commencement speech to the University of Michigan coined a new political phrase – “The Great Society” – which laid the foundation for greater Federal intervention in nearly all matters of private life and resurrected nationalized healthcare.
In 1965, Congress passed a wave of Great Society spending bills and established Medicaid. The Federal government likewise subsidized hospitals all around the nation, funding everything from healthcare to the purchase of new equipment and even lobby furniture. The new regime, which saw both a spending frenzy and widespread fraud, resulted in skyrocketing prices for healthcare and prescription medication.
By 1970, it had become apparent that the Great Society had only resulted in debt for the Federal Government and unbearable prices for consumers. Two watershed events followed the failure of the Great Society. First and foremost, the United States , which up to that point had backed its paper dollars by gold, was forced to employ the Federal Reserve in 1971 to expand the money supply by 10% just to keep pace with spending.
The result was that foreign holders of U.S. dollars began demanding gold, as it became readily apparent to the world that America ’s paper money might not be backed by anything. On August 15, 1971 , to prevent hyperinflation from setting in, Nixon froze wages and prices for 90 days and permanently ended the convertibility of dollars to gold.
The second major event was on December 29, 1973 when President Nixon signed the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 into law in response to skyrocketing healthcare and prescription costs caused by the Great Society’s market interventions. Since that day when HMOs were created, America has not been the same. Not only did the cost of healthcare and medicine continue to increase, but now a new industry – the health insurance industry – saw abuse, fraud and skyrocketing prices of its own.
President Barack Obama’s insistence on establishing a new healthcare regime in America via the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) as a result of supposedly evil insurance companies charging too much money and Americans not having enough access to healthcare and medicine is nothing short of a false flag.
The very healthcare crisis that exists today is a result of the failure of the Great Society and government’s insistence in intervening in the private market. The only thing that Washington D.C. in its quest to see nationalized healthcare realized is the creation of powerful pharmaceutical and insurance monopolies.
More shocking is the revelation from a recent PBS Frontline investigative report that the passage of the PPACA was never about providing better healthcare options to the people but rather establishing that everyone be forced to purchase insurance, thus creating a racket that even former DNC chair and presidential candidate Howard Dean called “an insurance company’s dream.”
Wendell Potter, former vice president of communications at CIGNA, speaking of the insurance lobby told Frontline: “They want to make sure that they get a requirement that all of us buy health insurance. They want to make sure that we are all forced by to buy products from them. And they want to make sure that there’s no alternative other than the private insurance market. That’s why they’re so adamantly opposed to the public option.”
The solution to these decades of failure, waste and market manipulations is not more “reform” but freedom. The cheapest way to make healthcare available to all is not to mandate it but to allow people to purchase it if they need it and leave it be if they don’t need it and to throw government interference out.
All across America , millions of people are calling for a reform of the PPACA and some eighteen states are suing the Federal government over the unconstitutional racket created by compulsory insurance. Just last week, U.S. Eastern District Judge Henry Hudson denied the Federal government its motion to dismiss Virginia’s lawsuit against PPACA and some 667,680 of Missouri’s voters voted for Proposition C, which nullifies enforcement of the PPACA in their state.
Now is the time for Americans to educate themselves on where our country is heading with universal healthcare. Our nation’s history in the evolution of healthcare needs to stop with the progression of a nationalized pursuit, but rather take step some steps backward to see that every American individual is entitled to make their own choice.
The answer to 1984 is 1776.
Danny de Gracia is the president of Free and Living Conservative.
Lauren Easley is a political scientist and a former policy advisor at the Hawaii State Legislature.