Most Americans know that the cost of health insurance has far outpaced the rate of inflation for many years. Indeed the cost and availability of health insurance lies at the root of the Congressional impasse which has so enraged so many people.
But despite all the finger pointing from both ends of the political spectrum, no one seems to understand the rather obvious reason for increasing health care costs.
It’s basic, fundamental economics.
If you separate the duty to pay for a benefit from the right to receive the benefit, the demand for the benefit will go up. And if the demand goes up, the price goes up.
In short, health care costs go up because most people have health insurance!
Years ago at Cooley Law School, we introduced a modest $5.00 co-pay for office visits, and the cost savings were astounding.
Let me say it again: what makes health care so expensive is the proliferation of health insurance. It doesn’t make any difference if the health insurance is private enterprise or a public option; if you separate the right to receive health care from the duty to pay for it, the cost will rise.
The solution to the health care dilemma is simple: Let everyone pay for their own health care. If they want to buy insurance and can afford it, they will buy insurance. If they don’t want insurance or can’t afford it, they won’t buy it.
Wait a minute, you say. What if the people who can’t afford health insurance get sick?
Good question. I’m not one to say let them suffer or let them die. I strongly believe that one of the fundamental duties of organized society is to care for the needy.
It is the role not only of private charity, but also of public institutions to foster and protect human life. The homeless, the hungry, the infirm, the injured; they are all our brothers and sisters. It is the proper duty of government at every level to provide for their needs.
The outpouring of public and private help to the people of Haiti is proof enough that organized society comes to the aid of every human being on the planet.
But the duty to help the needy does not presuppose a level of largess beyond the reasonable capacity of the donor.
Providing a home for the homeless doesn’t require guaranteeing everyone a three bedroom house in the suburbs. Feeding the hungry doesn’t mean serving a Thanksgiving turkey dinner every night on every street corner. And attending to the sick and injured doesn’t demand that every patient have a private hospital room and nurses around the clock.
The first rule of helping people is to encourage them to help themselves. During the Clinton years, we opted for workfare over welfare. It is time for the Obama administration to stress selfcare over healthcare.
I’m not talking about a nanny state in which a ubiquitous federal government dictates everyone’s diet and exercise routine. But I am suggesting that folks without a lot of money have always found inexpensive ways to take care of themselves, and the best way to encourage them to do that is stop talking about giving everyone free health insurance.
I wrote a blog some time back about a plan I called Medi-Fex. It is a simple way to guarantee adequate health care for everyone without mandating universal health insurance. It puts the first duty to pay the doctor on the patient. That’s about as fundamental as economics can get.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
In 1899, English poet Rudyard Kipling penned a poetic commentary on American occupation of the Philippines. Entitled, “The White Man’s Burden,” its sardonic message has been debated in literature classes for generations.
A New York newspaperman, John L. O’Sullivan, arguing for the annexation of Texas in 1845, insisted that the people of the United States were commissioned by the Almighty to migrate west. It was, in his view, our ‘Manifest Destiny’ to populate the continent.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the white man moved west under the protection of the United States army, which literally waged war against indigenous native tribes. Indians who were not killed or assimilated into the majority white population were moved to reservations.
Teddy Roosevelt personified the American spirit of ‘Manifest Destiny.’ He envisioned American expansion even more grandiose than stretching from sea to shining sea.
First Hawaii, then the Philippines. Roosevelt wanted a presence in the Pacific. He saw the native Filipinos as savages, primitive and uncivilized.
As President, he had 1,200 Filipinos brought to the 1904 World’s Fair in Saint Louis where they were put on display. James Bradley, author of The Imperial Cruise, quotes one fairgoer this way, “I went up to the Philippine village today and I saw the wild, barbaric Igorots, who eat dogs, and are so vicious that they are fenced in and guarded by a special constabulary…”
Further on, Bradley says, fair visitors would come upon the reassuring scene of freshly scrubbed Filipino children reciting their lessons in an American school, and finally they would see a troop of Filipino soldiers, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, and performing snapping military drills.
It was all part of what Roosevelt, and McKinley before him, had lauded as a policy of ‘benevolent assimilation.’ Benevolent indeed. In fact, the American occupation of the Philippines, after purchasing the islands from Spain for 20 million dollars, was a long, bloody, and brutal war. Natives were tortured and murdered by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Returning veterans were quoted in newspapers as saying, “The country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like Indians.”
The water cure, a crude and violent precursor of waterboarding, inspired a popular U.S. army marching song,
Get the old syringe boys and fill it to the brim
We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him
Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
We Americans have always been confident of our own rectitude. And we have every right to be proud of our tradition of generosity and compassion. This evening, we saw film clips of U.S. soldiers and marines ministering to the suffering people of Haiti. Last Sunday, our priest told us that the entire weekly collection would go to help the earthquake victims. At the Publix market, the check out lady asked if I wanted something added to my bill for Haitian relief.
We give, and we pray. And some of us get up and go to wherever we may be needed. Wherever we can help.
And when we see the squalor and the poverty and the anarchy; when we hear of the looting, the fighting, the random violence; the frantic grabbing and clutching that frustrates attempts to organize distribution of food and water, we wonder why there is no order, nobody in charge, no system in place for relief and survival.
Today there are echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s benevolent assimilation. How many years will it take to rebuild the infrastructure in Haiti? How much will it cost? How can we be assured that our largess is not wasted by corruption and incompetence?
How long should our troops stay to help the people?
Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether it is really our manifest destiny to
Take Up The White Man’s Burden.
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child
A New York newspaperman, John L. O’Sullivan, arguing for the annexation of Texas in 1845, insisted that the people of the United States were commissioned by the Almighty to migrate west. It was, in his view, our ‘Manifest Destiny’ to populate the continent.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the white man moved west under the protection of the United States army, which literally waged war against indigenous native tribes. Indians who were not killed or assimilated into the majority white population were moved to reservations.
Teddy Roosevelt personified the American spirit of ‘Manifest Destiny.’ He envisioned American expansion even more grandiose than stretching from sea to shining sea.
First Hawaii, then the Philippines. Roosevelt wanted a presence in the Pacific. He saw the native Filipinos as savages, primitive and uncivilized.
As President, he had 1,200 Filipinos brought to the 1904 World’s Fair in Saint Louis where they were put on display. James Bradley, author of The Imperial Cruise, quotes one fairgoer this way, “I went up to the Philippine village today and I saw the wild, barbaric Igorots, who eat dogs, and are so vicious that they are fenced in and guarded by a special constabulary…”
Further on, Bradley says, fair visitors would come upon the reassuring scene of freshly scrubbed Filipino children reciting their lessons in an American school, and finally they would see a troop of Filipino soldiers, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, and performing snapping military drills.
It was all part of what Roosevelt, and McKinley before him, had lauded as a policy of ‘benevolent assimilation.’ Benevolent indeed. In fact, the American occupation of the Philippines, after purchasing the islands from Spain for 20 million dollars, was a long, bloody, and brutal war. Natives were tortured and murdered by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Returning veterans were quoted in newspapers as saying, “The country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like Indians.”
The water cure, a crude and violent precursor of waterboarding, inspired a popular U.S. army marching song,
Get the old syringe boys and fill it to the brim
We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him
Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
We Americans have always been confident of our own rectitude. And we have every right to be proud of our tradition of generosity and compassion. This evening, we saw film clips of U.S. soldiers and marines ministering to the suffering people of Haiti. Last Sunday, our priest told us that the entire weekly collection would go to help the earthquake victims. At the Publix market, the check out lady asked if I wanted something added to my bill for Haitian relief.
We give, and we pray. And some of us get up and go to wherever we may be needed. Wherever we can help.
And when we see the squalor and the poverty and the anarchy; when we hear of the looting, the fighting, the random violence; the frantic grabbing and clutching that frustrates attempts to organize distribution of food and water, we wonder why there is no order, nobody in charge, no system in place for relief and survival.
Today there are echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s benevolent assimilation. How many years will it take to rebuild the infrastructure in Haiti? How much will it cost? How can we be assured that our largess is not wasted by corruption and incompetence?
How long should our troops stay to help the people?
Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether it is really our manifest destiny to
Take Up The White Man’s Burden.
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child
Saturday, January 9, 2010
LIFE IS MESSY
My son the law professor said it. Life is messy.
Like the view out the window of a speeding train, the landscape changes minute to minute. What was isn’t. What is wasn’t.
On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviet Union, led by the implacable Leonid Brezhnev, invaded the neighboring country of Afghanistan. It was a David and Goliath scenario. The mighty Soviet Union, with its nuclear arsenal, its sputniks in space and its powerful modern army against a primitive, tribal, disorganized country.
The Berlin Wall was still standing. Planet Earth shivered in a Cold War that divided humanity between East and West.
For the next eight and a half years, the Soviets tried to subjugate the Afgan people. But the locals refused to stop fighting. Student gangs, known as the Taliban, and other rebels and freedom fighters, called Mujahideen, fled to the mountains and kept up a continuous disruption of the Soviet occupation.
And, of course, the people of the United States cheered them. We had learned in World War II that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were the good guys.
And we helped them. The movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War” tells the story of how we did it. Our CIA sent guns. And missiles. And copies of the Koran, because we wanted to encourage the Mujahideen to see their struggle as divinely inspired.
In February of 1989, a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, called his soldiers home. Afghanistan had been his Viet Nam. On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Five months later, it came tumbling down.
Like a sudden change of scenery, September 11, 2001 opened the curtain on a new world view. The President of the United States, with the acquiescence of the Congress, ordered the invasion of Iraq. Nine years later, we are still there.
A new President, elected on a wave of anti war sentiment, now tells us that we are at war with Al-Qaeda. His army is in Afghanistan killing and being killed by the Taliban.
“Since 9-11 there has been an unfortunate confusion between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the minds of people who were previously unfamiliar with this region -- to the point where a U.S. member of Congress once expressed great surprise when I said the Taliban were not the people who [attacked] the World Trade Center," So says Barnett Rubin, Director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.
Of course the Congressman doesn’t know the difference between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Nobody in the streets of America does. To most of us, they are all Muslims. Fanatic Islamic Jihadists who grow their beards, subjugate and mistreat their women and regard Hugh Hefner’s America as an infidel nation.
Life is messy and war is the messiest part of it. Give a man a gun and he wants to know who he is supposed to shoot. In the good old days when Christian nations used to do battle with each other all the soldiers worn uniforms. You knew who the other guys were.
In Korea and Viet Nam, our people called all the natives “gooks.” The good gooks and the bad gooks all looked alike, but you were only supposed to kill the bad ones.
In World War II, we knew what we were trying to do. Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed that the goal was to achieve the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.
President Obama says we are at war with Al-Qaeda. O.K., then what is our goal?
Are we trying to get Osama Ben Laden and his followers to surrender, so we can bring them all to New York and put them on trial for 9/11? That’s not war. That’s law enforcement. That’s criminal justice.
Or are we just trying to kill them? Kill Ben Laden. Kill all the members of Al-Qaeda. Kill all the fanatical Muslim Jihadists who want us dead.
That’s not war either. That’s genocide.
Like the view out the window of a speeding train, the landscape changes minute to minute. What was isn’t. What is wasn’t.
On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviet Union, led by the implacable Leonid Brezhnev, invaded the neighboring country of Afghanistan. It was a David and Goliath scenario. The mighty Soviet Union, with its nuclear arsenal, its sputniks in space and its powerful modern army against a primitive, tribal, disorganized country.
The Berlin Wall was still standing. Planet Earth shivered in a Cold War that divided humanity between East and West.
For the next eight and a half years, the Soviets tried to subjugate the Afgan people. But the locals refused to stop fighting. Student gangs, known as the Taliban, and other rebels and freedom fighters, called Mujahideen, fled to the mountains and kept up a continuous disruption of the Soviet occupation.
And, of course, the people of the United States cheered them. We had learned in World War II that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were the good guys.
And we helped them. The movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War” tells the story of how we did it. Our CIA sent guns. And missiles. And copies of the Koran, because we wanted to encourage the Mujahideen to see their struggle as divinely inspired.
In February of 1989, a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, called his soldiers home. Afghanistan had been his Viet Nam. On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Five months later, it came tumbling down.
Like a sudden change of scenery, September 11, 2001 opened the curtain on a new world view. The President of the United States, with the acquiescence of the Congress, ordered the invasion of Iraq. Nine years later, we are still there.
A new President, elected on a wave of anti war sentiment, now tells us that we are at war with Al-Qaeda. His army is in Afghanistan killing and being killed by the Taliban.
“Since 9-11 there has been an unfortunate confusion between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the minds of people who were previously unfamiliar with this region -- to the point where a U.S. member of Congress once expressed great surprise when I said the Taliban were not the people who [attacked] the World Trade Center," So says Barnett Rubin, Director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.
Of course the Congressman doesn’t know the difference between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Nobody in the streets of America does. To most of us, they are all Muslims. Fanatic Islamic Jihadists who grow their beards, subjugate and mistreat their women and regard Hugh Hefner’s America as an infidel nation.
Life is messy and war is the messiest part of it. Give a man a gun and he wants to know who he is supposed to shoot. In the good old days when Christian nations used to do battle with each other all the soldiers worn uniforms. You knew who the other guys were.
In Korea and Viet Nam, our people called all the natives “gooks.” The good gooks and the bad gooks all looked alike, but you were only supposed to kill the bad ones.
In World War II, we knew what we were trying to do. Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed that the goal was to achieve the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.
President Obama says we are at war with Al-Qaeda. O.K., then what is our goal?
Are we trying to get Osama Ben Laden and his followers to surrender, so we can bring them all to New York and put them on trial for 9/11? That’s not war. That’s law enforcement. That’s criminal justice.
Or are we just trying to kill them? Kill Ben Laden. Kill all the members of Al-Qaeda. Kill all the fanatical Muslim Jihadists who want us dead.
That’s not war either. That’s genocide.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
THE BARBARY PIRATES
I just finished reading "The End of Barbary Terror" by Frederick C. Leiner. A useful perspective.
For over two hundred years, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the African nations of Morrocco, Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers, the so-called Barbary coast, ruled the Mediterranean. In the 250 years after the Moors were driven from Spain over 1,000,000white Christians were captured and enslaved by those Islamic states.
It became the custom of European nations to pay tribute to the Barbary potentates in order to insure safe passage of their merchant ships.
The United States began following the European tradition in the late 1700's at one time paying nearly one-seventh of the national revenue to the "Turks" as they were called.
In 1812 an American merchant ship, the "Edwin" was captured by the Algerines and her captain and crew delivered into slavery.
The U.S. at that time was busy fighting with Britain. What little navy we had was bottled up in harbors along there East coast by a British blockade.
But in 1815, after the treaty of Ghent, the House of Representatives voted 94-32 to declare war on Algiers and the Senate concurred by a vote of 27-2. President Madison sent Commodore Stephen Decatur with a squadron of ships to the Mediterranean. The aim of the war was simple: break the system of state sponsored maritime terrorism and end the Islamic North African practice of enslaving Americans or forcing the United States to pay tribute.
Decatur was eminently successful. By the 4th of July, 1815, he had captured two Algerine ships, killed their admiral and negotiated a treaty with the dey of Algiers in which the dey agreed to deliver up all American slaves and desist from piracy and stop demanding tribute of any kind.
All of which embarrassed the hell out of the British, who were still paying tribute despite having the most powerful navy in the world. As a result of U.S. leadership, the Brits finally laid siege to Algiers and the Barbary pirates were put out of business.
I pondered all these things in the light of an ongoing family discussion about Afganistan. President Obama has gotten high marks on his Nobel prize speech, and his defense of the concept of just warfare. By trying to focus on destroying Al Qaeda, he has connected the Afgan war to the 9/11 attack. My grandson, Tom III, said it best: he was ready to enlist on 9/12/01.
But the problem is that 9/11 was not an act of war in any classic or traditional sense. Whether it was inspired by fanatic religious jihad or some other motive, the attack was not the act of a nation against which a traditional war can be declared and waged. And the conundrum faced by our nation is how to respond if it happens again.
When crimes are committed in the United States by foreign nationals, we demand that they be arrested and extradited to face trial and punishment in our courts. If the criminals are not surrendered to us, or are deliberately given asylum in another country, we should take that refusal as a hostile act. Then our dispute is not with some amorphous gang of criminals, but with the nation which harbors them.
That would be the scenario for a just war.
For over two hundred years, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the African nations of Morrocco, Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers, the so-called Barbary coast, ruled the Mediterranean. In the 250 years after the Moors were driven from Spain over 1,000,000white Christians were captured and enslaved by those Islamic states.
It became the custom of European nations to pay tribute to the Barbary potentates in order to insure safe passage of their merchant ships.
The United States began following the European tradition in the late 1700's at one time paying nearly one-seventh of the national revenue to the "Turks" as they were called.
In 1812 an American merchant ship, the "Edwin" was captured by the Algerines and her captain and crew delivered into slavery.
The U.S. at that time was busy fighting with Britain. What little navy we had was bottled up in harbors along there East coast by a British blockade.
But in 1815, after the treaty of Ghent, the House of Representatives voted 94-32 to declare war on Algiers and the Senate concurred by a vote of 27-2. President Madison sent Commodore Stephen Decatur with a squadron of ships to the Mediterranean. The aim of the war was simple: break the system of state sponsored maritime terrorism and end the Islamic North African practice of enslaving Americans or forcing the United States to pay tribute.
Decatur was eminently successful. By the 4th of July, 1815, he had captured two Algerine ships, killed their admiral and negotiated a treaty with the dey of Algiers in which the dey agreed to deliver up all American slaves and desist from piracy and stop demanding tribute of any kind.
All of which embarrassed the hell out of the British, who were still paying tribute despite having the most powerful navy in the world. As a result of U.S. leadership, the Brits finally laid siege to Algiers and the Barbary pirates were put out of business.
I pondered all these things in the light of an ongoing family discussion about Afganistan. President Obama has gotten high marks on his Nobel prize speech, and his defense of the concept of just warfare. By trying to focus on destroying Al Qaeda, he has connected the Afgan war to the 9/11 attack. My grandson, Tom III, said it best: he was ready to enlist on 9/12/01.
But the problem is that 9/11 was not an act of war in any classic or traditional sense. Whether it was inspired by fanatic religious jihad or some other motive, the attack was not the act of a nation against which a traditional war can be declared and waged. And the conundrum faced by our nation is how to respond if it happens again.
When crimes are committed in the United States by foreign nationals, we demand that they be arrested and extradited to face trial and punishment in our courts. If the criminals are not surrendered to us, or are deliberately given asylum in another country, we should take that refusal as a hostile act. Then our dispute is not with some amorphous gang of criminals, but with the nation which harbors them.
That would be the scenario for a just war.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
MAKING SAUSAGE
They say that two things you should never watch being made are sausages and legislation.
Both are amalgamations of diverse unappetizing ingredients, made palatable only by integration into a single unidentifiable mass.
The currently debated health care bills are surely sausage in the making. Two thousand pages of arcane federal statutory language are sufficient to hide enough scraps of rotting pork and associated garbage to gag an army.
The result of this omnibus approach to health care, of course, is to invite scatter gun arguments for and against, with proponents and opponents pointing to unrelated sections, conflicting provisions, and opposing interpretations.
Apparently the conventional Congressional wisdom advises that bills need to be broad enough to induce support from a majority of each house by creating coalitions of legislators who have different axes to grind.
By this method, regulations which themselves have literally no public or legislative support can become the law of the land simply because they have been bundled up with a mass of unrelated rules, each of which claims a bare majority of supporters.
Article IV, Section 24 of the Michigan Constitution provides:
“No law shall embrace more than one object, which shall be expressed in its title.”
No doubt there are similar provisions in most State constitutions.
Perhaps it is time to amend the federal Constitution in a similar vein. How about this for the 28th Amendment:
No Bill in either House of the Congress shall embrace more than one object which shall be expressed in its title, nor shall any bill consist of more than one thousand words in the English language.
Both are amalgamations of diverse unappetizing ingredients, made palatable only by integration into a single unidentifiable mass.
The currently debated health care bills are surely sausage in the making. Two thousand pages of arcane federal statutory language are sufficient to hide enough scraps of rotting pork and associated garbage to gag an army.
The result of this omnibus approach to health care, of course, is to invite scatter gun arguments for and against, with proponents and opponents pointing to unrelated sections, conflicting provisions, and opposing interpretations.
Apparently the conventional Congressional wisdom advises that bills need to be broad enough to induce support from a majority of each house by creating coalitions of legislators who have different axes to grind.
By this method, regulations which themselves have literally no public or legislative support can become the law of the land simply because they have been bundled up with a mass of unrelated rules, each of which claims a bare majority of supporters.
Article IV, Section 24 of the Michigan Constitution provides:
“No law shall embrace more than one object, which shall be expressed in its title.”
No doubt there are similar provisions in most State constitutions.
Perhaps it is time to amend the federal Constitution in a similar vein. How about this for the 28th Amendment:
No Bill in either House of the Congress shall embrace more than one object which shall be expressed in its title, nor shall any bill consist of more than one thousand words in the English language.
Friday, November 20, 2009
HEALTH CARE SIMPLIFIED
The KISS principle needs to be revived and observed in the nation’s capitol.
K.I.S.S. stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid.
A 1,900 page Health Care Bill is rather obviously a violation of KISS, so I would like to offer an idea that is simple, understandable, workable and founded on proven principles of free enterprise.
I call it “Medi Fex,” because it mimics Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not that those two entities have acquitted themselves which much honor of late, but at least the concept of a federally chartered quasi public corporation is nothing new.
Here it is:
MEDI FEX
There is hereby created a Federal Corporation to be known as the Medical Fee Exchange Corporation which shall be authorized to purchase from health care providers such accounts receivable for medical services rendered as shall not be declared ineligible under State law.
The Medical Fee Exchange Corporation shall be governed by a Board of Directors consisting of fifteen persons appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, no less than seven of whom shall be licensed health care providers.
I suppose it’s a little sanguine to hope that Congress might be able to whittle 1,900pages down to two paragraphs, but I submit that those 80 words contain the substance of a health care program which leaves no one out and does what just about what everybody wants to get done.
First, if you have insurance, fine. Medi Fex leaves you right where you are.
Second, if you don’t have insurance, Medi Fex assures that you won’t be turned away by a doctor or hospital because you don’t have insurance or the money to pay in advance. You get the service and the doctor or hospital sends you a bill. If you don’t pay or can’t pay the bill, you will end up having to deal with Medi Fex. If Medi Fex doesn’t think you can afford to pay the bill, they can write it off.
Under Medi Fex, the question of what health care is or is not affordable, is decided on a case by case basis.
Under Medi Fex, the sticky question of abortion is right back where it belongs and where it was before the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade: in the State Legislatures.
Is it too much to hope that the Republicans in the Senate might take a moment from their busy schedules to read 80 words, and think about it?
Is it too much to hope that the Democrats in the Senate might listen to an idea that didn’t originate inside the beltway?
K.I.S.S. stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid.
A 1,900 page Health Care Bill is rather obviously a violation of KISS, so I would like to offer an idea that is simple, understandable, workable and founded on proven principles of free enterprise.
I call it “Medi Fex,” because it mimics Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not that those two entities have acquitted themselves which much honor of late, but at least the concept of a federally chartered quasi public corporation is nothing new.
Here it is:
MEDI FEX
There is hereby created a Federal Corporation to be known as the Medical Fee Exchange Corporation which shall be authorized to purchase from health care providers such accounts receivable for medical services rendered as shall not be declared ineligible under State law.
The Medical Fee Exchange Corporation shall be governed by a Board of Directors consisting of fifteen persons appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, no less than seven of whom shall be licensed health care providers.
I suppose it’s a little sanguine to hope that Congress might be able to whittle 1,900pages down to two paragraphs, but I submit that those 80 words contain the substance of a health care program which leaves no one out and does what just about what everybody wants to get done.
First, if you have insurance, fine. Medi Fex leaves you right where you are.
Second, if you don’t have insurance, Medi Fex assures that you won’t be turned away by a doctor or hospital because you don’t have insurance or the money to pay in advance. You get the service and the doctor or hospital sends you a bill. If you don’t pay or can’t pay the bill, you will end up having to deal with Medi Fex. If Medi Fex doesn’t think you can afford to pay the bill, they can write it off.
Under Medi Fex, the question of what health care is or is not affordable, is decided on a case by case basis.
Under Medi Fex, the sticky question of abortion is right back where it belongs and where it was before the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade: in the State Legislatures.
Is it too much to hope that the Republicans in the Senate might take a moment from their busy schedules to read 80 words, and think about it?
Is it too much to hope that the Democrats in the Senate might listen to an idea that didn’t originate inside the beltway?
Sunday, November 1, 2009
CHANGING AMERICA
BERRIEN COUNTY BAR ASSOCIATION
September 22, 2009
The last time I spoke to the Berrien County Bar Association was May 1, 1967. That was 42 years ago. I don’t suppose many of you were there that night.
Scott Dienes tells me he was still en ventra sa mere at the time.
The title of my talk was “A Lasting Civilization Through Law.” I seem to recall that the Harold Palladium published the full text.
I dug that old speech out and read it over. I don’t think I could say anything more pertinent today than what I said 42 years ago.
The nineteen sixties were turbulent times. Lyndon Johnson was President. There were 360 thousand American soldiers in Viet Nam; young people were becoming hippies, burning their draft cards, moving to Canada.
In San Francisco, they called it the summer of love. In Detroit it was the summer of hell. Thousands of buildings were burned, more thousands of people were arrested, 43 citizens were killed. Federal troops had to be summoned to quell the riot. You had a riot right here in Benton Harbor the year before.
White people fled the cities. When I was elected Common Pleas Court Judge in Detroit in 1961, it was the fourth largest city in America with nearly two million residents. Today there are less than 900 thousand.
In 1960, Benton Harbor had a population of about 19,000; 14,000 white and 5,000 black.
Today, the city has something like 10,000 residents, only about 500 of whom are white.
In 1967 there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no satellites.
In 1967 they were just clearing the land to start building the World Trade Center.
There’ve been a lot of changes in America.
I started my 1967 speech by talking about presidential campaign slogans. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”, John Kennedy’s “New Frontier”, Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Truman’s “Fair Deal.”
Last year we heard a new slogan: “Change we can Believe In.”
Barrack Obama was elected in 2008 because he represented change. He promised America a new era; it was to be post racial; post political. Our troops in Iraq would come home. The divisions and the stalemates, the petty politics of the past, were to be set aside. It was to be a time of hope.
Thousands of people chanting “Yes, we can” believed they were welcoming a new dawn of empowerment, a new day of accountable, transparent government.
For those of us who remember the 1960’s and the booming voice of Martin Luther King chanting his litany of aspirations for his people, the election of a president of African descent in 2008 reverberated with the echoing phrase. “I have a dream.”
But dreams have a way of dissipating with the dawn and the yawn of a new day. President Obama is still popular, still charismatic, and his election is still of historic significance.
But the American people are still hoping and still crying out for change; change to believe in; change that really makes a difference in what goes on in Washington DC; change that renews their confidence and pride in our nation.
The silent majority is speaking up all across the country. From home grown tea parties in city after city, to town hall forums, to a massive protest march on the nation’s capital.
We are a war weary, bankrupt nation, overrun with illegal immigration, drowning in consumer credit default. Our neighborhoods are haunted by empty houses and mortgage foreclosures, our Congressmen refuse to read the legislation they want us to accept on faith, our prisons are full, too many of our people are unemployed; too many are disillusioned, too many are disgusted and discouraged.
And too many expect the federal government to subsidize the economy, bolster the banks, bail out the automakers, and pay all the doctor bills.
There’s an article by columnist Charley Reese circulating on the Internet which talks about the 545 people in Washington D.C. who are responsible for all our troubles.
545 people. 435 Representatives in Congress, 100 Senators, 9 Supreme Court Justices and one President.
545 people who have either caused all of our problems or have failed to fix all the problems that have been caused by somebody else.
The gist of Charley’s tirade is that if we throw all the rascals out, we could fix everything that is wrong in America.
I don’t see it that way.
I don’t think just changing the players would accomplish anything. Saturday Night Live mocked George W. Bush for eight years. They have already started to ridicule Barack Obama.
In December of 1955, I was a Republican candidate for the United States Congress. I was defeated by a young man who was elected to succeed his father in the 15th District of Michigan.
That young man’s name was John Dingell. Today, 54 years later, he is the longest serving Congressman in the history of the United States of America.
John and I have been friends for more than half a century. He’s a nice fellow and a loyal American.
He’s also a smart politician who thinks he ought to be entitled to help run our country as long as he lives.
I don’t think so.
But I also don’t think electing new people to play the same old game is the answer. We have to change the rules of the game.
Article V of the United States Constitution provides two ways to amend the Supreme Law of the Land.
Congress can propose amendments by a two thirds vote in both houses. That has been done twenty five times.
The second way has never been used. Article V provides that if two thirds of the States request it, the Congress shall call a convention for proposing amendments.
Over the 220 years of our history, there have been 750 petitions for a convention filed in the Congress. Every state in the union has petitioned more than once.
Congress has ignored them. Congress has not even counted them.
Some people argue that petitions for a convention must all spell out the same issue. Article V doesn’t require that. The states may all want a convention for different reasons. The only thing that matters is that two thirds of the states want a convention.
I wrote a law review article in 1982 called “Return to Philadelphia.” I tried to make a case for calling an Article V convention. I didn’t exactly create a stir in the academic community.
The Federalist Society invited me to Yale University to a seminar and I gave a speech entitled “The Last Prerogative.” Still no enthusiasm.
But I am nothing if not persistent.
A couple of years ago I found some people who agree with me. A man named Bill Walker had taken a case all the way to the US Supreme Court insisting that the Congress was in violation of the constitution for not calling a convention.
Bill is a very bright fellow, but he is not a lawyer. He couldn’t find a lawyer who was willing to take his case, so he proceeded in pro per.
Of course he lost.
But Bill and I and a few others formed an organization called Friends of the Article V Convention. We pronounce the acronym FOAVC as “foe vic.”
FOAVC is non partisan. We aren’t advocating any particular amendment. We just think it’s time for the people of the United States to fix our government.
An article V convention is not a constitutional convention such as we had here in Michigan in 1963.
It would have no authority to scrap the Philadelphia charter and start all over again.
An article V convention can only propose amendments; specific changes dealing with only one subject which must be ratified by three quarters of the states.
The idea of an Article V convention has been ridiculed by both the left and the right wings of our political spectrum. You hear the cry ‘run away convention’ from those folks.
They gasp with horror at the thought that anyone would tamper with the sacred screed written by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
That’s not the way the founding fathers saw it.
Here’s what Thomas Jefferson had to say in 1816:
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.”
I have a long history of tilting at windmills and dreaming the impossible dream. People thought I was crazy to try to start a law school with fifty dollars.
But I really do believe that America needs an Article V convention, and I’m eighty year old so I can believe whatever I want to believe.
What kinds of amendments would a convention propose?
How about congressional term limits?
And limiting presidential war powers?
And requiring a balanced budget?
And limiting the federal debt?
The list goes on. Popular election of the President. A system of presidential primaries. Non partisan nominations to the Supreme Court, and age or term limits for the justices.
A group of professors at Yale University recently published a book entitled “The Constitution in 2020.”
They see all kinds of change in our constitution in the next eleven years, but oddly no amendments.
Like many constitutional scholars, they agree with Charles Evans Hughes who opined, “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” And Felix Frankfurter, who told law students, “The Supreme Court is the Constitution.”
I prefer the view of Thomas M. Cooley who said, “A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time and another at some subsequent time when the circumstances may have so changed as perhaps to make a different rule in the case seem desirable.”
He felt that judges who do that are guilty of “reckless disregard of official oath and public duty.”
Pragmatists argue that the constitution is too hard to amend; that approval by three quarters of the states is too difficult, and so they prefer to make the basic charter of our government and our freedoms subject to amendment by five votes on the high court.
Article VI of the constitution requires every public official to take an oath to support “this constitution.”
It’s not an oath to obey the United States Supreme Court.
No reasonable reading of the American Constitution will yield any conclusion other than that it was intended to be a written law, adopted by the supreme authority of the people of the United States and expected to remain effective and in force, according to the plain, original meaning of its words, unless and until it would be amended pursuant to Article V.
Alexander Hamilton said it this way:
“Until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon themselves collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption, or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives in a departure from it, prior to such an act.”
My successor at Cooley, President Don Leduc, has given me the green light to organize a seminar on Article V as Cooley’s observance of Constitution day in 2010.
I’m looking forward to it.
I want to see us bring together constitutional scholars, legislators, and patriots from all over America to talk seriously about an Article V convention; what it can do; how it would work; why it must be done if our Republic is to be renewed and revitalized.
The seminar is but a small beginning. Because Congress must call the convention, and because Congress fears the convention, Congress will drag its feet and try to find every conceivable excuse to refuse to act.
Only an aroused citizenry can make it happen. I invite the lawyers of Berrien County to think about it, to talk about it. I invite you to visit the FOAVC website at FOAVC.org.
I thank you for the opportunity to share with you my thoughts and my dreams for this great nation.
And America is a great nation, the greatest on earth, the greatest in all of human history. But as I said 42 years ago, a lasting civilization can only be achieved through wise and effective laws, understood and supported by the people.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom and protecting the rule of law is a full time job.
And that, ladies and Gentlemen, is what you and I will be doing for the rest of our lives.
September 22, 2009
The last time I spoke to the Berrien County Bar Association was May 1, 1967. That was 42 years ago. I don’t suppose many of you were there that night.
Scott Dienes tells me he was still en ventra sa mere at the time.
The title of my talk was “A Lasting Civilization Through Law.” I seem to recall that the Harold Palladium published the full text.
I dug that old speech out and read it over. I don’t think I could say anything more pertinent today than what I said 42 years ago.
The nineteen sixties were turbulent times. Lyndon Johnson was President. There were 360 thousand American soldiers in Viet Nam; young people were becoming hippies, burning their draft cards, moving to Canada.
In San Francisco, they called it the summer of love. In Detroit it was the summer of hell. Thousands of buildings were burned, more thousands of people were arrested, 43 citizens were killed. Federal troops had to be summoned to quell the riot. You had a riot right here in Benton Harbor the year before.
White people fled the cities. When I was elected Common Pleas Court Judge in Detroit in 1961, it was the fourth largest city in America with nearly two million residents. Today there are less than 900 thousand.
In 1960, Benton Harbor had a population of about 19,000; 14,000 white and 5,000 black.
Today, the city has something like 10,000 residents, only about 500 of whom are white.
In 1967 there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no satellites.
In 1967 they were just clearing the land to start building the World Trade Center.
There’ve been a lot of changes in America.
I started my 1967 speech by talking about presidential campaign slogans. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”, John Kennedy’s “New Frontier”, Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Truman’s “Fair Deal.”
Last year we heard a new slogan: “Change we can Believe In.”
Barrack Obama was elected in 2008 because he represented change. He promised America a new era; it was to be post racial; post political. Our troops in Iraq would come home. The divisions and the stalemates, the petty politics of the past, were to be set aside. It was to be a time of hope.
Thousands of people chanting “Yes, we can” believed they were welcoming a new dawn of empowerment, a new day of accountable, transparent government.
For those of us who remember the 1960’s and the booming voice of Martin Luther King chanting his litany of aspirations for his people, the election of a president of African descent in 2008 reverberated with the echoing phrase. “I have a dream.”
But dreams have a way of dissipating with the dawn and the yawn of a new day. President Obama is still popular, still charismatic, and his election is still of historic significance.
But the American people are still hoping and still crying out for change; change to believe in; change that really makes a difference in what goes on in Washington DC; change that renews their confidence and pride in our nation.
The silent majority is speaking up all across the country. From home grown tea parties in city after city, to town hall forums, to a massive protest march on the nation’s capital.
We are a war weary, bankrupt nation, overrun with illegal immigration, drowning in consumer credit default. Our neighborhoods are haunted by empty houses and mortgage foreclosures, our Congressmen refuse to read the legislation they want us to accept on faith, our prisons are full, too many of our people are unemployed; too many are disillusioned, too many are disgusted and discouraged.
And too many expect the federal government to subsidize the economy, bolster the banks, bail out the automakers, and pay all the doctor bills.
There’s an article by columnist Charley Reese circulating on the Internet which talks about the 545 people in Washington D.C. who are responsible for all our troubles.
545 people. 435 Representatives in Congress, 100 Senators, 9 Supreme Court Justices and one President.
545 people who have either caused all of our problems or have failed to fix all the problems that have been caused by somebody else.
The gist of Charley’s tirade is that if we throw all the rascals out, we could fix everything that is wrong in America.
I don’t see it that way.
I don’t think just changing the players would accomplish anything. Saturday Night Live mocked George W. Bush for eight years. They have already started to ridicule Barack Obama.
In December of 1955, I was a Republican candidate for the United States Congress. I was defeated by a young man who was elected to succeed his father in the 15th District of Michigan.
That young man’s name was John Dingell. Today, 54 years later, he is the longest serving Congressman in the history of the United States of America.
John and I have been friends for more than half a century. He’s a nice fellow and a loyal American.
He’s also a smart politician who thinks he ought to be entitled to help run our country as long as he lives.
I don’t think so.
But I also don’t think electing new people to play the same old game is the answer. We have to change the rules of the game.
Article V of the United States Constitution provides two ways to amend the Supreme Law of the Land.
Congress can propose amendments by a two thirds vote in both houses. That has been done twenty five times.
The second way has never been used. Article V provides that if two thirds of the States request it, the Congress shall call a convention for proposing amendments.
Over the 220 years of our history, there have been 750 petitions for a convention filed in the Congress. Every state in the union has petitioned more than once.
Congress has ignored them. Congress has not even counted them.
Some people argue that petitions for a convention must all spell out the same issue. Article V doesn’t require that. The states may all want a convention for different reasons. The only thing that matters is that two thirds of the states want a convention.
I wrote a law review article in 1982 called “Return to Philadelphia.” I tried to make a case for calling an Article V convention. I didn’t exactly create a stir in the academic community.
The Federalist Society invited me to Yale University to a seminar and I gave a speech entitled “The Last Prerogative.” Still no enthusiasm.
But I am nothing if not persistent.
A couple of years ago I found some people who agree with me. A man named Bill Walker had taken a case all the way to the US Supreme Court insisting that the Congress was in violation of the constitution for not calling a convention.
Bill is a very bright fellow, but he is not a lawyer. He couldn’t find a lawyer who was willing to take his case, so he proceeded in pro per.
Of course he lost.
But Bill and I and a few others formed an organization called Friends of the Article V Convention. We pronounce the acronym FOAVC as “foe vic.”
FOAVC is non partisan. We aren’t advocating any particular amendment. We just think it’s time for the people of the United States to fix our government.
An article V convention is not a constitutional convention such as we had here in Michigan in 1963.
It would have no authority to scrap the Philadelphia charter and start all over again.
An article V convention can only propose amendments; specific changes dealing with only one subject which must be ratified by three quarters of the states.
The idea of an Article V convention has been ridiculed by both the left and the right wings of our political spectrum. You hear the cry ‘run away convention’ from those folks.
They gasp with horror at the thought that anyone would tamper with the sacred screed written by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
That’s not the way the founding fathers saw it.
Here’s what Thomas Jefferson had to say in 1816:
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.”
I have a long history of tilting at windmills and dreaming the impossible dream. People thought I was crazy to try to start a law school with fifty dollars.
But I really do believe that America needs an Article V convention, and I’m eighty year old so I can believe whatever I want to believe.
What kinds of amendments would a convention propose?
How about congressional term limits?
And limiting presidential war powers?
And requiring a balanced budget?
And limiting the federal debt?
The list goes on. Popular election of the President. A system of presidential primaries. Non partisan nominations to the Supreme Court, and age or term limits for the justices.
A group of professors at Yale University recently published a book entitled “The Constitution in 2020.”
They see all kinds of change in our constitution in the next eleven years, but oddly no amendments.
Like many constitutional scholars, they agree with Charles Evans Hughes who opined, “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” And Felix Frankfurter, who told law students, “The Supreme Court is the Constitution.”
I prefer the view of Thomas M. Cooley who said, “A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time and another at some subsequent time when the circumstances may have so changed as perhaps to make a different rule in the case seem desirable.”
He felt that judges who do that are guilty of “reckless disregard of official oath and public duty.”
Pragmatists argue that the constitution is too hard to amend; that approval by three quarters of the states is too difficult, and so they prefer to make the basic charter of our government and our freedoms subject to amendment by five votes on the high court.
Article VI of the constitution requires every public official to take an oath to support “this constitution.”
It’s not an oath to obey the United States Supreme Court.
No reasonable reading of the American Constitution will yield any conclusion other than that it was intended to be a written law, adopted by the supreme authority of the people of the United States and expected to remain effective and in force, according to the plain, original meaning of its words, unless and until it would be amended pursuant to Article V.
Alexander Hamilton said it this way:
“Until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon themselves collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption, or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives in a departure from it, prior to such an act.”
My successor at Cooley, President Don Leduc, has given me the green light to organize a seminar on Article V as Cooley’s observance of Constitution day in 2010.
I’m looking forward to it.
I want to see us bring together constitutional scholars, legislators, and patriots from all over America to talk seriously about an Article V convention; what it can do; how it would work; why it must be done if our Republic is to be renewed and revitalized.
The seminar is but a small beginning. Because Congress must call the convention, and because Congress fears the convention, Congress will drag its feet and try to find every conceivable excuse to refuse to act.
Only an aroused citizenry can make it happen. I invite the lawyers of Berrien County to think about it, to talk about it. I invite you to visit the FOAVC website at FOAVC.org.
I thank you for the opportunity to share with you my thoughts and my dreams for this great nation.
And America is a great nation, the greatest on earth, the greatest in all of human history. But as I said 42 years ago, a lasting civilization can only be achieved through wise and effective laws, understood and supported by the people.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom and protecting the rule of law is a full time job.
And that, ladies and Gentlemen, is what you and I will be doing for the rest of our lives.
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