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Monthly Archives: July 2017

GOP Bills Would Erase Protections For Sick


It is unfortunate that too many Americans who voted for TOTUS do not understand the larger impact this so called “repeal and replace” will have on them. The hateful rhetoric of this administration and the ongoing subterfuge will in a short time throw the country in turmoil. The Child bully will do nothing but harm as long as he is in office. Our Congress is no longer representing us, they are doing no more than drawing a paycheck and enjoying the healthcare we ALL should enjoy.  MA

Tribune Washington Bureau
Noam N. Levey

14 hrs ago

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, despite repeated pledges to preserve sick Americans’ access to health coverage, are poised to scrap this core insurance protection in their campaign to roll back the Affordable Care Act.
The House GOP bill that passed in May and the revised Senate GOP bill announced last week would effectively eliminate the coverage guarantee by allowing health insurers to once again sell skimpier plans and charge more to people with preexisting health conditions who need more-comprehensive coverage
At the same time, the House and Senate bills would significantly scale back financial aid to low- and moderate-income consumers, and slash funding for Medicaid, the government safety-net plan that has helped millions of sick and poor Americans gain coverage.
That combination — looser insurance requirements and less financial assistance for patients — would once again put health plans out of reach for millions of sick Americans, according to numerous analyses.
“The fundamental guarantee at the heart of the Affordable Care Act was that people who are sick can get insurance at the same price as everyone else,” said Larry Levitt, an insurance market expert at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. “The House and Senate replacement bills move the system back to a place where healthy and sick people are treated very differently.”
The Senate is slated to begin voting on its health care bill this week.
The Affordable Care Act’s coverage guarantee remains among the most popular parts of the 2010 law, with nearly 7 in 10 Americans rating it favorably.
Trump administration officials and GOP congressional leaders insist the Republican bills won’t leave anyone behind.
“The legislation ensures that every American with pre-existing conditions has access to the coverage and care they need, no exceptions,” Vice President Mike Pence told a meeting of the National Governors Association in Rhode Island Friday.
But that assurance has been contradicted by nearly every independent evaluation of the Republican health care bills, including two lengthy reports by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Pence’s claims are also at odds of with the assessment of health insurers themselves.
On Friday, the heads of the industry’s two leading advocacy groups — America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association — called the Senate bill “simply unworkable,” warning it “would undermine protections for those with pre-existing medical conditions.”
Similarly, in a letter to Senate leaders this month, the American Academy of Actuaries warned that provisions of the Senate GOP bill “could erode pre-existing condition protections” and “make it more difficult for high-cost individuals and groups to obtain coverage.”
Nearly every major patient advocacy organization has reached the same conclusion.
“Older and sicker individuals … would face the full cost of these higher premiums, leaving millions of people with chronic conditions and disabilities unable to afford the kind of coverage they need,” a coalition of 13 patient groups wrote in a letter to senators last week, condemning the latest version of the Senate bill.
The coalition includes the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the March of Dimes, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the AARP and the advocacy arm of the American Cancer Society.
The kind of deregulated insurance markets envisioned by the House and Senate bills would mark a return to what health insurance looked like before the current health care law was enacted in 2010.
Before the Affordable Care Act, most insurance companies worked aggressively to exclude sick customers, either denying coverage altogether or charging unaffordable prices to people with pre-existing conditions such as cancer, diabetes, even acne.
That left tens of millions of Americans with next to no options for coverage.
Although some states offered special health plans for sick patients who’d been rejected by insurers, most of these so-called high-risk pools limited benefits or capped enrollment because the coverage was so costly.
“It was a medical gulag,” said Richard Figueroa, former enrollment director of California’s plan, which had a long waiting list because demand always outstripped money available for coverage.
The Affordable Care Act fundamentally equalized how health insurance treats patients. Insurers were not only forbidden to deny coverage to sick consumers, they also had to provide a basic set of benefits.
That standardization ensured that sick Americans were not forced to pay more for health insurance than healthy Americans, who might be tempted to buy skimpier plans that did not offer some benefits, such as prescription drugs or mental health and substance-abuse therapy.
This meant higher costs for some consumers, particularly those who enjoyed lower premiums before the law, when insurers were allowed to exclude the sick.But uniform standards are necessary to ensure equal access to coverage, said Manatt Health managing director Joel Ario, a former insurance commissioner in Oregon and Pennsylvania. “It doesn’t work unless everyone participates on the same terms.”
To date, more than 20 million Americans have gained coverage through the law and many more depend on its protections.
Republicans have been careful to emphasize that their legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act would not eliminate the coverage guarantee that prohibits insurers from denying coverage.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., famously pledged that he wouldn’t vote for a bill that didn’t pass what he called the “Jimmy Kimmel test,” in a reference to the late-night host’s emotional explanation of how important it had been that his baby son was not shut out of insurance coverage after being born with congenital heart disease.
Last week, Senate GOP leaders said they were simply trying to give consumers the opportunity to find more-affordable coverage.
“We think it’s great to give people more options and more choices and the freedom to actually buy the insurance products they want,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the third-ranking Republican.
Conservative Republicans led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who insists on the insurance deregulation, have said they will not support the Affordable Care Act repeal bill without Cruz’s amendment.
But offering this kind of “choice” — even with additional money to help sick consumers — would effectively end the coverage guarantee, the two health insurance groups said.
“Given our experience and long-standing commitment to providing health care coverage, we understand what it takes to make health insurance markets work for consumers,” the presidents of the groups wrote.
“We believe strongly that the rules must apply equally to all insurance.”

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Senate Republicans included a provision that exempts members of Congress and their staff from part of their latest health care plan.


We see again the Neer do wells taking care of themselves rather than the “American People” they are so find of citing. MA

Senate Republicans exempt own health coverage from part of latest proposal
Updated by Sarah Kliffsarah@vox.com Jul 13, 2017, 3:00pm
Senate Republicans included a provision that exempts members of Congress and their staff from part of their latest health care plan.

Vox’s daily email explaining the biggest news in health care, edited by Sarah Kliff

This exemption could have the effect of ensuring that members of Congress have coverage for a wider array of benefits than other Americans who purchase their own coverage.
A Senate Republican aide confirmed that the exemption existed but was unable to comment as to the specific effect it would have. The aide said it was included to ensure that the bill hewed to the chamber’s strict reconciliation rules that limit the policies this health bill can include.
The exemption is similar to the one that existed in the House health bill. After Vox reported on its existence, the House voted to close the loophole — and the Senate aide expected their chamber to follow the same path.
An exemption mandates that members of Congress have access to the essential health benefits
The revised Senate health bill draft released Thursday lets health insurers offer plans that do not cover the Affordable Care Act’s essential health benefits, which requires insurers to include a wide array of benefits such as maternity care and mental health services.
Insurers can offer plans without these benefits — unless they’re selling coverage to members of Congress and their staff, who are required to buy coverage on the health law marketplaces. The exemption says this part of the law still applies to any plans sold to Congress.
The language of this exemption is very similar to the exemption in the House repeal bill. It appears on page 167 of the bill, in this paragraph (bolding my own):
(d) NON-APPLICABLE PROVISIONS DESCRIBED. — The provisions described in this subsection are the following:
(1) Subsection (d) of section 1302 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (42 U.S.C. 6 18022); except for the purposes of applying section 1302(b) to sections 1252, 1301(a)(2), 1312(d)(3)(D), 1331, 1333, and 1334 of such Act, subsection (b) of such section 1302; and subsection (c)(1)(B) of such section 1302.
To decode that language a little bit: The bolded text says that section 1302(b) will still apply to certain plans. Section 1302(b) is the part of the Affordable Care Act that spells out what is included in the essential health benefits.
The section then goes on to spell out which plans get to keep essential health benefits. It includes the plans specified in 1312(d)(3)(D) of the Affordable Care Act — the section that covers the health plans of members of Congress and their benefits.
Congress does not get an exemption in this bill from plans that ban preexisting conditions or charge sick people higher premiums. The exemption is relatively narrow, and the expert who pointed it out to me (Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee University) is somewhat puzzled about how this would work in practice.
The Senate draft, for example, would still allow insurers to charge higher prices to those with preexisting conditions — when selling to Congress as well as to the rest of the public. This could create an odd scenario where the plans that Congress is eligible for have to cover a wide array of benefits but can also deny coverage or charge more to those expected to have higher costs.
Reconciliation rules mandate that the Senate bill only include policies under the jurisdiction of two committees: Budget and HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions). The Senate aide I spoke with explained that the regulation of congressional health plans falls under the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee, and therefore changes to their benefits could not be included in this bill. A fuller explanation is available here from Factcheck.org, outlining the jurisdictional issues raised by reconciliation.

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America


 

The state of hate in America
19 / 19

USA TODAY
Alia E. Dastagir

It feels like nearly every week, America is rattled by a new incident of hate.

In June, a white man in a Chicago Starbucks was filmed calling a black man a slave, and a white woman in a New Jersey Sears was videotaped making bigoted comments against a family she believed was Indian (they were not). In May, two men on a Portland train were stabbed to death trying to stop a white supremacist’s anti-Muslim tirade against two teenagers.
Hate symbols are showing up around the country: nooses in the nation’s capital, racist graffiti on the front gate of LeBron James’ Los Angeles home, a banner with an anti-Semitic slur over a Holocaust memorial in Lakewood, N.J. On Saturday, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied in Charlottesville, Va., less than two months after white supremacist Richard Spencer — who coined the term “alt-right” — led a similar protest in the city against the removal of a Confederate monument. Several white nationalist groups are planning another rally for Aug. 12.
In an America where deep divisions exposed in the presidential election have only intensified in the past eight months, these incidents take on new meaning as they become more widespread.
“They’re increasing not only in number but in terms of their ferocity,” said Chip Berlet, a scholar of the far right.
Groups that track these incidents — including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the non-profit news organization ProPublica, which is creating a national database of hate crimes and bias — say hate incidents are a national problem whose scope we don’t fully grasp. Tracking them is notoriously difficult:
Not all law enforcement agencies send hate crime data to the FBI.
Five states don’t have any hate crime protections.
Many states don’t include protections for LGBTQ people.
Incidents of public harassment motivated by hate bias may not meet the legal definition of a “hate crime.”
While a patchwork of data means we don’t have a complete picture of the problem, the SPLC and the ADL say available numbers show disturbing trends. In its most recent hate crimes report, the FBI tracked a total of 5,818 hate crimes in 2015, a rise of about 6.5% from the previous year, and showed that attacks against Muslims surged. The SPLC documented an uptick of hate and bias incidents after the presidential election, tracking 1,094 in the first month alone. The organization also says the number of hate groups in the U.S. increased for a second year in a row in 2016. In April, the ADL reported anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. rose 86% in the first quarter of 2017.
“Even though the data is incomplete, we still think it’s statistically significant, and in that it’s troubling to see more manifestations of prejudice than we’ve seen in the past,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL.
Minorities feel less safe
By 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority, a change driven by immigration, according to the Pew Research Center. An analysis conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic — based on surveys taken before and after the election — reveals that members of the white working class concerned about immigration were more than 3.5 times more likely to vote for President Trump. Nearly half of white working-class Americans said, “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”
Heidi Beirich, leader of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project — which publishes the organization’s Hatewatch blog — said right now minorities feel less safe, particularly Muslim and immigrant communities. According to the Pew Research Center, 41% of Hispanics say they have serious concerns about their place in America since the presidential election.
“People feel like they could be attacked at any moment,” she said. “Often, they also don’t trust the police to help them.”
While the FBI’s data typically show 5,000 to 6,000 hate crimes a year, the Department of Justice’s estimates are much higher. A report out this month from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, show Americans experienced an average of 250,000 hate crime victimizations each year from 2004 to 2015. About a quarter of hate crime victims who didn’t report said they feared police wouldn’t be able to help them.
Us vs. Them
For years before he ran for president, Trump roused the “birther” movement that falsely questioned the legitimacy of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. During the presidential campaign, Trump said an Indiana-born federal judge was biased because of his “Mexican heritage.” Since becoming president, Trump has taken a hard stance on immigration, instituting a travel ban on immigrants from six Muslim-majority countries, which the Supreme Court partially reinstated in late June.
Trump’s ascendance, Berlet said, was built upon a narrative of “us vs. them,” language that resonates with many Americans who fear cultural shifts brought on by changing demographics.
After the deadly shooting at Pulse nightclub in June 2016, then-candidate Trump said, “The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And we had death and destruction.”
“When a public figure with a high status identifies a group that is described as threatening to the stability of the community or the nation, in certain conditions this can lead people to conclude that they have to defend their way of life from these ‘others,'” Berlet said. “These scapegoated or demonized others have to be either silenced or eradicated.”
Trump has been repeatedly asked to do more to denounce hate associated with his name. Expressions of bigotry among his supporters were well-documented during his campaign and Trump himself has been accused by civil rights groups of using hateful and violent rhetoric, as well as being too reticent in condemning it. Just this month, Trump posted a CNN smackdown clip on Twitter that was taken from a Reddit troll who the ADL says has “a consistent record of racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry.”
Of the 1,094 hate and bias incidents the SPLC counted in the month after the election, 37% of them directly referenced either Trump, his campaign slogans or his remarks about sexual assault.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer has denied that such hate incidents have increased since Trump’s election victory. And many Americans who support Trump — though they admire his bluntness and tendency to eschew political correctness — say they don’t condone racism or violence either.
“It doesn’t make one racist to have voted for Trump, and I’m sure many didn’t pay that much attention to the campaign,” Beirich said. “That said, Trump’s rants against Mexicans, Muslims and women were widely reported. So clearly Trump’s views on these matters weren’t disqualifying for many Trump voters. For those Trump voters bothered by this racism, I hope they will speak out against it. It could help increase civility in the U.S.”
A nation divided
Increased political polarization is part of what moves hate from the margins to the mainstream, Greenblatt said. Sentiments once considered extreme become validated and “people feel the pain of prejudice in a manner that is really beneath our values as a country,” he said.
The Pew Research Center found about half of Democrats and Republicans say the other party makes them feel “afraid.” More than 40% of Democrats and Republicans say the opposite party’s “policies are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”
“I don’t think either side of the ideological spectrum is exempt from intolerance,” Greenblatt said. “Whether it’s the U.S. president, or a university president … I think we should expect our leaders to stand up and speak out against manifestations of hate.”
And the rest of us? We remain where we always have, Greenblatt said, capable of moving the country away from cruelty and toward greater justice.
When the approximately 50 KKK members converged on Charlottesville this weekend to protest what Klan member James Moore called “the ongoing cultural genocide … of white Americans,” more than a thousand counter protesters showed up to decry hate in their city. The Klan members were heavily outnumbered, chants of “white power” drowned out by “racists go home.”
“I think all of us have an obligation to interrupt intolerance when it happens and to be an ally when we see others being subjected to harassment and hate,” Greenblatt said. “We owe it to ourselves to make sure we call upon our better angels when we see people that we know, or don’t know, who are being treated unfairly because of how they look or how they pray or who they love. Every one of us is capable of rising to that occasion.”

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Thou Shalt not Steal


Hobby Lobby hypocrite or just business as usual? The company was  investigated regarding illegal artifacts brought into their Bible Museum. The company was fined 3 million dollars and had to return items. It makes one wonder how holy art thou?

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The Dumbest Criticism of Single Payer Health Care


It is unfortunate that our Neer do well Congress is intent on hurting the people they purport to represent, the long noses are insisting that they are doing good work for us. I offer that we let them know that we are not as dumb as they would assume we are. MA

The Plum Line | Opinion
The dumbest criticism of single payer health care
By Paul Waldman
July 6, 2017 at 12:59 PM

Democratic politicians are rapidly embracing single payer health care, and as they do, they’re being met with an utterly bogus criticism. Unfortunately, it’s coming not only from Republicans but also from misinformed members of the media.
So before this goes any farther, we need to get a few things straight.
To see how this is happening, take a look at a recent exchange between some CNN personalities and Randy Bryce, the mustachioed ironworker challenging Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, as reported by the Post’s David Weigel. Bryce favors single payer, and has said he supports a plan that Rep. John Conyers has been offering in Congress for years:
This week, Bryce beamed into CNN to keep up the momentum — and ran straight into a question about whether he, like a growing number of Democrats, supports European-style universal health care.
“You want to raise $32 trillion in taxes?” asked CNN’s John Berman.
“There’s a lot of people not paying their fair share in taxes,” Bryce said. “There’s corporations getting away with a lot.”
“That would be quite a tax hike,” said CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “That’s an astonishing number, $32 trillion over a decade.”
Ugh. We saw a similar discussion in 2016 around Bernie Sanders’ single payer plan, and while I had numerous criticisms of that plan, this is the single dumbest response to single payer that you could possibly come up with. We shouldn’t be surprised to hear it from Republicans — if there’s an enormous number they can toss around while screaming “Democrats are gonna raise your taxes by a zillion percent!” they’ll do it. But no self-respecting journalist should fall into the trap of repeating something so inane.

There is simply no critique you can make of single payer health care that is more wrong than “It’ll be too expensive.” That is 180 degrees backwards. Single payer is many things, but above all it is cheap. And what we have now is the most expensive system in the world, by a mile.
If we were to institute some kind of single payer system, what we’d be doing when it comes to money is changing how we pay for health care. But when you say, “Hoo boy, it would mean trillions in new taxes!”, you’re acting as though we’d be paying all those taxes on top of what we’re already paying. But of course we wouldn’t.
Let’s look at what we’re paying now. In 2016, we spent $3.4 trillion on health care. That spending is projected to rise an average of 5.6 percent per year over the next decade. If you do the math, that means that between 2018 and 2027 we’ll spend $49 trillion on health care in America. That’s the current system.
That $32 trillion number the CNN folks are tossing around comes from an analysis of the Conyers bill, which is basically a placeholder — it’s only 30 pages long, which for bill texts is like an executive summary of an executive summary. If we get to single payer, the Conyers bill won’t be it. Nevertheless, Republicans have seized on the $32 trillion number to scare people into thinking that Democrats want to raise their taxes some insane amount (“When you look at the majority of House Democrats, they support a single-payer, $32 trillion bill backed by Bernie Sanders,” says Sean Spicer). But if we’re going to spend $49 trillion under the current system, and single payer would cost $32 trillion, doesn’t that mean we’d be saving $17 trillion? Congrats on all the money you’d be getting back!
It wouldn’t work out that way precisely, of course. But the point is, if we were to shift to a single payer system we’d be changing how we pay for health care, not just paying more. Right now if you’re like most working-age Americans, you pay thousands of dollars every year to insurance companies. If we switch to a primarily government-funded plan, you’d pay for it with taxes, but you’d be relieved of what you now pay to insurers.
But Republicans would like you to believe that any cost of single payer would be on top of what you already pay, which is completely false. Now here’s the truth: Republicans don’t object to single payer because it’s expensive, because compared to what we have now, it isn’t. Their objection is philosophical: they don’t think it’s government’s role or obligation to provide health insurance.
We should have a robust debate about whether it is or not. But Republicans don’t really want to have that debate, because the last few months have proven something that chills them to the marrow of their bones: Americans like government health coverage. Medicare is spectacularly popular, and it turns out Medicaid is popular, too. Most people have no problem going on a government health plan, if it provides good benefits. They don’t think that being kicked off Medicaid makes people “free.” They aren’t hoping for some glorious Randian future where the noble rich get health coverage and the weak and sick are left to their own devices. That may be Paul Ryan’s fantasy, but for most people, it’s a nightmare.
There are two more points I’d like to make about single payer as a policy and political matter. The first is that “single payer” is not well defined, and people use it to refer to a range of very different health systems. In a pure form, it would mean that the government pays for all health care and there are no private insurers; Great Britain’s system is the one that comes closest. But there are very successful systems that achieve universal coverage and have a role for private insurers, whether they’re hybrid systems built on a basic government plan that covers everyone but that also include private supplemental insurance (as in France), or systems built on private but tightly regulated plans from which everyone chooses (as in Germany).
As Democrats start advocating more strongly for single payer, they need to think seriously about which of these systems they favor and how to get from where we are now to there. I’d prefer a hybrid system built on an expanded Medicaid, but there are arguments to be made for each of them. Any Democrat who says “I’m for single payer” should be prepared to answer the follow-up question, “What kind?”
Second, Republicans are going to try very hard to scare Democrats into retreating into a milquetoasty vagueness on this issue, particularly in 2018. Right now Democrats are debating among themselves about whether it’s more important to just be anti-Trump or to have a clear and identifiable agenda voters can understand. The answer is: Yes! Being anti-Trump is incredibly important, particularly to 2018, since success in midterm elections comes from turning out your base. But those base voters also need to know that Democrats know what they want to do the next time they have the power to enact their own policies, and voters in the middle need a sense of what their agenda is.
The nice thing about single payer is that unlike previous Democratic health care reforms, it’s not that hard to explain. But if they’re going to get the chance, they’ll have to bat away some bogus attacks from Republicans — and, sadly, from the news media too.

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My Opinion


The continual stream of news and revelations surrounding the Trump Presidency and the candidate’s run up to the election is quite disturbing. His actions before and after becoming President show a person who has no sense of what the job entails and seemingly does not care. This looks like a person who did not want the job and has appointed people who support him rather than people who will do work for the people of the United States. The continual cropping up of activities that refute the denials regarding Russian contacts before the election and after , should make all of us shudder. We are in a position where our long time allies are tacitly distancing them selves from our Titular head (not us as a Country). This leaves us vulnerable to more incursions from foreign sources. These sources recognize the lack of understanding of the world as a whole by this President. It is unfortunate that we have a neer do well Congress who are ignoring this so they can forward their own anti “American People “agenda. If you believe we are doing well as a country but can do better then I would advise you to pay close attention to the representative you elected to serve you and what they have or have not done for you. Your knowledge is the best asset you have to gain better government representation. Forget  the TV news hype and use your common sense to parse out the truth. Please read and listen to several sources of information to form your opinions. It is well to remember the old adage: “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it is most surely a duck”.

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Illinois treasurer to governor: No ‘junk’ for credit trunk


The Governor is a microcosm of the Trump administration except Ruiner appears to be a bit less “Tweet” prone. It seems that the GOP is destined to disrupt Democracy as we currently know it and as it was originally framed. History has proven time after time that in general the GOP has appeared more anti American people than the Dems no matter what they try to assert as a party for the people (not of the people). Neither group is doing their best work but this a classic case of the lesser of two evils. MA

JOHN O’CONNOR
Associated Press

July 10, 2017

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The state’s Democratic treasurer issued Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner an unsolicited to-do list for staving off fiscal failure Monday, directing the Republican to get behind the state’s first budget in two years and “dial down the rhetoric.”
Treasurer Michael Frerichs, at times sounding like a boarding-school headmaster, told a Chicago news conference that Rauner must go to New York. There, Frerichs said, the multimillionaire former private equity investor must persuade credit-rating agencies that he’s committed to the $36 billion spending plan that lawmakers enacted last week over his vetoes and to hold off on knocking Illinois’ creditworthiness to “junk” status.
Rauner’s office rejected the call and refused to pledge support for the enacted budget — which ended the nation’s longest state budget standoff since at least the Great Depression — and instead labeled it out of balance and urged lawmakers to continue negotiating. Frerichs said such a response “signals the possibility that the governor will not implement the budget package, thereby inviting downgrade.”
Two major bond houses gave Illinois a reprieve last week after approval of a budget built on $5 billion income tax increase. A third, Moody’s Investors Service, warned that despite the expected infusion of cash, the Prairie State’s $14.7 billion heap of overdue bills and $130 billion deficit in employee pension accounts still invited calamity. Junk status would force the state to pay even higher rates of interest on its debt.
“The governor is a very successful investor. As such, he understands the danger of junk bond status,” Frerichs said. “I also believe that he has never navigated the hallways of government, because he has never served in government; he made his fortune taking significant risks, but always with the ability to walk away.
“The nuance of legislating and budgeting was, is and remains foreign to him,” the first-term treasurer said. “We need to embrace pragmatism. The governor has yet to do that.”
Frerichs was pointedly partisan but his remarks lacked the malice that continues to pervade the Capitol. Rauner has named the income-tax increase, a 32 percent jump in the personal tax rate, for his nemesis, Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan of Chicago. In retaliatory fashion, when addressing the past-due bill pile which has tripled in 2 ½ years, Democratic Comptroller Susana Mendoza references the “Rauner Backlog.”
“Dial down the rhetoric,” Frerichs said. ” … Such vitriol is not productive.”
Rauner was having none of it Monday.
“Madigan’s 32 percent permanent tax increase will not solve the problems created by decades of unbalanced budgets, unfunded pension liabilities, borrowing and high debt,” spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis said in a statement. “Even with the tax increase, this budget remains $2 billion out of balance.”
Rauner announced an office shakeup Monday. He named 34-year-old Kristina Rasmussen chief of staff. Rasmussen was president and CEO of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, to which Rauner is a major contributor. She replaces 33-year-old Richard Goldberg, who leaves the $180,000 post to return to private-sector consulting.
Other Frerichs prescriptions for Rauner include taking advantage of budget-law authority to borrow $6 billion. The interest rate would be at a premium, but far less than the 12 percent annual late-payment interest attached to the overdue bills
And he wants Rauner to make clear his intentions on an education-funding overhaul the Legislature overwhelmingly endorsed in May. The budget requires that no general state aid go to schools unless it’s through the legislation’s newly crafted formula to get more money to poorer schools with fewer resources. Rauner promises a veto, saying it’s too generous to cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools.
___
Associated Press writer Sophia Tareen contributed from Chicago.
___
Contact Political Writer John O’Connor at https://twitter.com/apoconnor . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/john%20o’connor

 

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Apparently Not


The recent decision in Minnesota over the death of Mr. Philando Castile , a registered firearms owner apparently is not important to the NRA. It is reasonable to think that a case like this would raise the hackles of this gun rights organization but perhaps only if you are White.

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Australian reporter tears into Trump’s performance at G-20


I wonder if this article will deemed “Fake News”? MA

Dylan Stableford 17 hours ago

Chris Uhlmann (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
President Trump declared his trip to the G-20 summit a “great success.” Chris Uhlmann, the political editor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, saw it a bit differently.
“We learned that Donald Trump has pressed fast-forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader,” Uhlmann said on air in a segment that has gone viral. “He managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies, and to diminish America.”
Uhlmann described Trump as “an uneasy, lonely, awkward figure” at the gathering of world leaders in Hamburg, Germany.
“And you got the strong sense that some of the leaders are trying to find the best way to work around him,” Uhlmann said.

The U.S. president has a “particular skill set,” Uhlmann said. “He’s identified an illness in Western democracies, but he has no cure for it and seems intent on exploiting it.”
“He has no desire and no capacity to lead the free world,” Uhlmann continued.
The president had an opportunity to put pressure on Russia and China by delivering a G-20 statement condemning North Korea’s nuclear provocations, he said.
“Other leaders expected it,” Uhlmann said. “They were prepared to back it, but it never came.”
Uhlmann acknowledged that Trump’s speech in Poland ahead of the G-20 summit was well received, but argued that it didn’t reveal Trump’s true feelings about the world because it was written for him.
“There’s a tendency among some hopeful souls to confuse the speeches written for Trump with the thoughts of the man himself — he did make some interesting, scripted observations in Poland about defending the values of the West,” Uhlmann said. “And he’s in a unique position. He’s the one man who has the power to do something about it. But it’s the unscripted Trump that’s real.”
Uhlmann pointed to Trump’s tweets as the real window into the president’s unvarnished self.
“[He is] a man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as president at war with the West’s institutions — like the judiciary, independent government agencies and the free press,” Uhlmann said.

“Donald Trump’s a man who craves power because it burnishes his celebrity,” Uhlmann added. “To be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters, and there is no value placed on the meaning of words — so what’s said one day can be discarded the next.”
“Some will cheer the decline of America” on the world stage, Uhlmann concluded, “but I think we’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
Earlier Sunday, Trump declared the G-20 was a “great success,” saying he “strongly pressed” Russian President Vladimir Putin on Moscow’s meddling in the U.S. election, that Putin “vehemently” denied involvement by the Kremlin, and that “it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!”.

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Healthcare Efforts Beginning with FDR


Since 1944 several Presidents (Democrats) have attempted to get a National Health care plan established, the closest we have gotten is the ACA nicknamed “Obamacare” as a scare tactic. The articles below are a long read but explain the GOP opposition to a National Health Care act since 1944. If we as voters do not pay close attention to our legislators and hold their feet to the fire we will end up with poor health care again. Mr. McConnell is still trying to take away what we have while threatening that the GOP may have to join with the Democrats to craft a workable Health Care bill, what a concept, isn’t that what they are supposed to do? It does not matter what party affiliation you adhere to, the people you voted in work for you and for the past 10 to 20 years that has not been the case. voters need to step up and say no to poor legislation. MA

FDR’s State of the Union Message to Congress
January 11, 1944
To the Congress:
This Nation in the past two years has become an active partner in the world’s greatest war against human slavery.
We have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule.
But I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and our allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.
We are united in determination that this war shall not be followed by another interim which leads to new disaster that we shall not repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolationism—that we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this Nation went for a joy ride on a roller coaster which ended in a tragic crash.
When Mr. Hull went to Moscow in October, and when I went to Cairo and Teheran in November, we knew that we were in agreement with our allies in our common determination to fight and win this war. But there were many vital questions concerning the future peace, and they were discussed in an atmosphere of complete candor and harmony.
In the last war such discussions, such meetings, did not even begin until the shooting had stopped and the delegates began to assemble at the peace table. There had been no previous opportunities for man-to-man discussions which lead to meetings of minds. The result was a peace which was not a peace.
That was a mistake which we are not repeating in this war.
And right here I want to address a word or two to some suspicious souls who are fearful that Mr. Hull or I have made “commitments” for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties, or to enacting the role of Santa Claus.
To such suspicious souls—using a polite terminology—I wish to say that Mr. Churchill, and Marshal Stalin, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek are all thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution. And so is Mr. Hull. And so am I.
Of course we made some commitments. We most certainly committed ourselves to very large and very specific military plans which require the use of all Allied forces to bring about the defeat of our enemies at the earliest possible time.
But there were no secret treaties or political or financial commitments.
The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each Nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word: Security.
And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of Nations.
In the plain down-to-earth talks that I had with the Generalissimo and Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill, it was abundantly clear that they are all most deeply interested in the resumption of peaceful progress by their own peoples—progress toward a better life. All our allies want freedom to develop their lands and resources, to build up industry, to increase education and individual opportunity, and to raise standards of living.
All our allies have learned by bitter experience that real development will not be possible if they are to be diverted from their purpose by repeated wars—or even threats of war.
China and Russia are truly united with Britain and America in recognition of this essential fact:
The best interests of each Nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving Nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace. In the present world situation, evidenced by the actions of Germany, Italy, and Japan, unquestioned military control over disturbers of the peace is as necessary among Nations as it is among citizens in a community. And an equally basic essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all Nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.
There are people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power- and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades. That is just plain common sense—and it is the kind of plain common sense that provided the basis for our discussions at Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran.
Returning from my journeyings, I must confess to a sense of “let-down” when I found many evidences of faulty perspective here in Washington. The faulty perspective consists in overemphasizing lesser problems and thereby underemphasizing the first and greatest problem.
The overwhelming majority of our people have met the demands of this war with magnificent courage and understanding. They have accepted inconveniences; they have accepted hardships; they have accepted tragic sacrifices. And they are ready and eager to make whatever further contributions are needed to win the war as quickly as possible- if only they are given the chance to know what is required of them.
However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors- profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment.
Such selfish agitation can be highly dangerous in wartime. It creates confusion. It damages morale. It hampers our national effort. It muddies the waters and therefore prolongs the war.
If we analyze American history impartially, we cannot escape the fact that in our past we have not always forgotten individual and selfish and partisan interests in time of war—we have not always been united in purpose and direction. We cannot overlook the serious dissensions and the lack of unity in our war of the Revolution, in our War of 1812, or in our War Between the States, when the survival of the Union itself was at stake.
In the first World War we came closer to national unity than in any previous war. But that war lasted only a year and a half, and increasing signs of disunity began to appear during the final months of the conflict.
In this war, we have been compelled to learn how interdependent upon each other are all groups and sections of the population of America.
Increased food costs, for example, will bring new demands for wage increases from all war workers, which will in turn raise all prices of all things including those things which the farmers themselves have to buy. Increased wages or prices will each in turn produce the same results. They all have a particularly disastrous result on all fixed income groups.
And I hope you will remember that all of us in this Government represent the fixed income group just as much as we represent business owners, workers, and farmers. This group of fixed income people includes: teachers, clergy, policemen, firemen, widows and minors on fixed incomes, wives and dependents of our soldiers and sailors, and old-age pensioners. They and their families add up to one-quarter of our one hundred and thirty million people. They have few or no high pressure representatives at the Capitol. In a period of gross inflation they would be the worst sufferers.
If ever there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home—bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at the front for us here.
Those who are doing most of the complaining are not deliberately striving to sabotage the national war effort. They are laboring under the delusion that the time is past when we must make prodigious sacrifices- that the war is already won and we can begin to slacken off. But the dangerous folly of that point of view can be measured by the distance that separates our troops from their ultimate objectives in Berlin and Tokyo—and by the sum of all the perils that lie along the way.
Overconfidence and complacency are among our deadliest enemies. Last spring—after notable victories at Stalingrad and in Tunisia and against the U-boats on the high seas—overconfidence became so pronounced that war production fell off. In two months, June and July, 1943, more than a thousand airplanes that could have been made and should have been made were not made. Those who failed to make them were not on strike. They were merely saying, “The war’s in the bag- so let’s relax.”
That attitude on the part of anyone—Government or management or labor—can lengthen this war. It can kill American boys.
Let us remember the lessons of 1918. In the summer of that year the tide turned in favor of the allies. But this Government did not relax. In fact, our national effort was stepped up. In August, 1918, the draft age limits were broadened from 21-31 to 18-45. The President called for “force to the utmost,” and his call was heeded. And in November, only three months later, Germany surrendered.
That is the way to fight and win a war—all out—and not with half-an-eye on the battlefronts abroad and the other eye-and-a-half on personal, selfish, or political interests here at home.
Therefore, in order to concentrate all our energies and resources on winning the war, and to maintain a fair and stable economy at home, I recommend that the Congress adopt:
(1) A realistic tax law—which will tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate, and reduce the ultimate cost of the war to our sons and daughters. The tax bill now under consideration by the Congress does not begin to meet this test.
(2) A continuation of the law for the renegotiation of war contracts—which will prevent exorbitant profits and assure fair prices to the Government. For two long years I have pleaded with the Congress to take undue profits out of war.
(3) A cost of food law—which will enable the Government (a) to place a reasonable floor under the prices the farmer may expect for his production; and (b) to place a ceiling on the prices a consumer will have to pay for the food he buys. This should apply to necessities only; and will require public funds to carry out. It will cost in appropriations about one percent of the present annual cost of the war.
(4) Early reenactment of. the stabilization statute of October, 1942. This expires June 30, 1944, and if it is not extended well in advance, the country might just as well expect price chaos by summer.
We cannot have stabilization by wishful thinking. We must take positive action to maintain the integrity of the American dollar.
(5) A national service law- which, for the duration of the war, will prevent strikes, and, with certain appropriate exceptions, will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this Nation.
These five measures together form a just and equitable whole. I would not recommend a national service law unless the other laws were passed to keep down the cost of living, to share equitably the burdens of taxation, to hold the stabilization line, and to prevent undue profits.
The Federal Government already has the basic power to draft capital and property of all kinds for war purposes on a basis of just compensation.
As you know, I have for three years hesitated to recommend a national service act. Today, however, I am convinced of its necessity. Although I believe that we and our allies can win the war without such a measure, I am certain that nothing less than total mobilization of all our resources of manpower and capital will guarantee an earlier victory, and reduce the toll of suffering and sorrow and blood.
I have received a joint recommendation for this law from the heads of the War Department, the Navy Department, and the Maritime Commission. These are the men who bear responsibility for the procurement of the necessary arms and equipment, and for the successful prosecution of the war in the field. They say:
“When the very life of the Nation is in peril the responsibility for service is common to all men and women. In such a time there can be no discrimination between the men and women who are assigned by the Government to its defense at the battlefront and the men and women assigned to producing the vital materials essential to successful military operations. A prompt enactment of a National Service Law would be merely an expression of the universality of this responsibility.”
I believe the country will agree that those statements are the solemn truth.
National service is the most democratic way to wage a war. Like selective service for the armed forces, it rests on the obligation of each citizen to serve his Nation to his utmost where he is best qualified.
It does not mean reduction in wages. It does not mean loss of retirement and seniority rights and benefits. It does not mean that any substantial numbers of war workers will be disturbed in their present jobs. Let these facts be wholly clear.
Experience in other democratic Nations at war—Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand- has shown that the very existence of national service makes unnecessary the widespread use of compulsory power. National service has proven to be a unifying moral force based on an equal and comprehensive legal obligation of all people in a Nation at war.
There are millions of American men and women who are not in this war at all. It is not because they do not want to be in it. But they want to know where they can best do their share. National service provides that direction. It will be a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.
I know that all civilian war workers will be glad to be able to say many years hence to their grandchildren: “Yes, I, too, was in service in the great war. I was on duty in an airplane factory, and I helped make hundreds of fighting planes. The Government told me that in doing that I was performing my most useful work in the service of my country.”
It is argued that we have passed the stage in the war where national service is necessary. But our soldiers and sailors know that this is not true. We are going forward on a long, rough road- and, in all journeys, the last miles are the hardest. And it is for that final effort—for the total defeat of our enemies-that we must mobilize our total resources. The national war program calls for the employment of more people in 1944 than in 1943.
It is my conviction that the American people will welcome this win-the-war measure which is based on the eternally just principle of “fair for one, fair for all.”
It will give our people at home the assurance that they are standing four-square behind our soldiers and sailors. And it will give our enemies demoralizing assurance that we mean business -that we, 130,000,000 Americans, are on the march to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo.
I hope that the Congress will recognize that, although this is a political year, national service is an issue which transcends politics. Great power must be used for great purposes.
As to the machinery for this measure, the Congress itself should determine its nature—but it should be wholly nonpartisan in its make-up.
Our armed forces are valiantly fulfilling their responsibilities to our country and our people. Now the Congress faces the responsibility for taking those measures which are essential to national security in this the most decisive phase of the Nation’s greatest war.
Several alleged reasons have prevented the enactment of legislation which would preserve for our soldiers and sailors and marines the fundamental prerogative of citizenship—the right to vote. No amount of legalistic argument can becloud this issue in the eyes of these ten million American citizens. Surely the signers of the Constitution did not intend a document which, even in wartime, would be construed to take away the franchise of any of those who are fighting to preserve the Constitution itself.
Our soldiers and sailors and marines know that the overwhelming majority of them will be deprived of the opportunity to vote, if the voting machinery is left exclusively to the States under existing State laws—and that there is no likelihood of these laws being changed in time to enable them to vote at the next election. The Army and Navy have reported that it will be impossible effectively to administer forty-eight different soldier voting laws. It is the duty of the Congress to remove this unjustifiable discrimination against the men and women in our armed forces- and to do it as quickly as possible.
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights- for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do. Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.
Our fighting men abroad- and their families at home- expect such a program and have the right to insist upon it. It is to their demands that this Government should pay heed rather than to the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.
The foreign policy that we have been following—the policy that guided us at Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran—is based on the common sense principle which was best expressed by Benjamin Franklin on July 4, 1776: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
I have often said that there are no two fronts for America in this war. There is only one front. There is one line of unity which extends from the hearts of the people at home to the men of our attacking forces in our farthest outposts. When we speak of our total effort, we speak of the factory and the field, and the mine as well as of the battleground — we speak of the soldier and the civilian, the citizen and his Government.
Each and every one of us has a solemn obligation under God to serve this Nation in its most critical hour—to keep this Nation great — to make this Nation greater in a better world.

I failed at national compulsory health insurance “I usually find that those who are loudest in protesting against medical help by the federal government are those who do not need help.”

Truman’s Attempt at National Health Care

“I have had some bitter disappointments as president, but the one that has troubled me most, in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat opposition to a national compulsory health insurance program . A national system of payments for healthcare”We are rightly proud of the high standards of medical care we know how to provide in the US. The fact is, however, that most of our people cannot afford to pay for the care they need. I have often & strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program. The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles. This great nation cannot afford to allow its citizens to suffer needlessly from the lack of proper medical care.”

Source: The Wit & Wisdom of Harry Truman, by Ralph Keyes, p.159 , Jan 15, 1953

National health program: adequate care to all who need it. Of all our national resources, none is of more basic value than the health of our people. Over a year ago I presented to the Congress my views on a national health program. The Congress acted on several of the recommendations in this program–mental health, the health of mothers and children, and hospital construction. I urge this Congress to complete the work begun last year and to enact the most important recommendation of the program–to provide adequate medical care to all who need it, not as charity but on the basis of payments made by the beneficiaries of the program.

One administrative change would help greatly to further our national program in the fields of health, education, and welfare. I again recommend the establishment of a well-integrated Department of Welfare.

Source: 47 State of the Union message to Congress , Jan 6, 1947 Pres. Truman’s 19

Kennedy’s Attempt at National Healthcare

JFK Attempted unsuccessfully to create retirement-based Medicare
Of all his narrow losses, the most discouraging to him was the defeat of his “Medicare” bill–the long-sought plan enabling American working men and women to contribute to their own old-age health insurance program under Social Security instead of forcing them, once their jobs and savings were gone, to fall back on public or private charity. The cost of his own father’s hospitalization made him all the more aware of how impossible it was for those less wealthy to bear such a burden. The Medicare bill was lost, and he went immediately on television to declare that this “most serious defeat for every American family” would be a key issue in the fall campaign. The 87th and 88th Congresses would in time pass more health care legislation than any two Congresses in history–including landmarks in mental health and mental retardation, medical schools, drug safety, hospital construction and air & water pollution–but the President never got over the disappointment of this defeat
Source: “Kennedy” by Ted Sorensen, p. 342-344 , Jan 1, 1965

Social Security can pay for good medical care for elderly
The proposal advanced by you and by Sen. Javits would have cost $600 million — Gov. Rockefeller rejected it in New York, said he didn’t agree with the financing at all, said it ought to be on Social Security. Let’s look at bills that Vice President Nixon suggests were too extreme. One is medical care for the aged which is tied to Social Security, which is financed out of Social Security funds. It does not put a deficit on the Treasury.

President Johnson signing the Medicare bill.
When on July 30, 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law at the Harry S. Truman Library, he told the nation that it had “all started with the man from Independence.” Harry S. Truman, Johnson said, had “planted the seeds of compassion and duty” that led to the enactment of Medicare, a national health insurance for the aged through an expanded Social Security system.
Truman was the first president to publicly endorse a national health insurance program. As a Senator Truman had become alarmed at the number of draftees who had failed their induction physicals during World War II. For Truman these rejections meant that the average citizen could not afford visiting a doctor to maintain health. He stated “that is all wrong in my book. I am trying to fix it so the people in the middle-income bracket can live as long as the very rich and the very poor.”
Truman’s first proposal in 1945 provided for physician and hospital insurance for working-aged Americans and their families. A federal health board was to administer the program with the government retaining the right to fix fees for service, and doctors could choose whether or not to participate. This proposal was defeated after, among many factors, the American Medical Association labeled the president’s plan “socialized medicine” taking advantage of the public’s concern over communism in Russia.
Even though he was never able to create a national health care program, Truman was able to draw attention to the country’s health needs, have funds legislated to construct hospitals, expand medical aid to the needy, and provide for expanded medical research. In honor of his continued advocacy for national health insurance, Johnson presented Truman and his wife Bess with Medicare cards number one and two in 1966.

2017 Now we have The GOP still trying to prevent us from having National Healthcare.

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