Bray published his two pieces on Feb 1 and Feb 3, 2011, and I
responded to them more ore less jointly on Feb and Feb 7, by which
he was no longer interested in discussing he matter.
I do not recall Mr Bray showing any kind of sustained interest in
health care issues, over an acquaintance of some years. I think what
set him off, apart from the general level of furor at the time, was
the invocation of the 1792 Militia Act, as a precedent.
Chris Bray, Your Argument Just Tripped on a Rock and Shot Itself in
the Foot With a Rusty Musket, HNN Cliopatria [pseudonym],Feb 1, 2011
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/136087.html
(now at)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/136087
My response (02/07/2011 05:51 PM)
Sailors as a Special Case in the Parish Welfare System.
Well, as I keep having to point out, I am not a Colonial/
Early American expert, but I do know something about England
at the same period.
The basic unit of local government was the parish, or
the town of one parish, which usually came to the same thing.
"Health, Education, and Welfare" issues were handled at this
level. The customary arrangements came from England, and were
still substantially the same. There was not very much travel
in the first place, on account of its obvious difficulty, and
obviously vulnerable people, such as the very old, pregnant
women, etc., traveled still less. There was the notion of
"settlement," something like citizenship on the local
level. You possessed a settlement in a parish, generally
by virtue of being born there, or apprenticed there, or married
there. Settlement meant that the parish had to maintain
you when you became an economic liability. If you did not have
settlement, and you became unable to work, you got deported
back to the place you had come from. You know, like Mexican
immigrants.
There is a literature of New England small towns. I myself know a
very small portion of it. I suppose a starting point would be:
Michael Zuckerman, _Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in
the Eighteenth Century_ (1970). One might also look at
Carl Bridenbaugh's _Cities In Revolt: Urban Life in
America, 1743-1776_ (1955, 1970). Bear in mind that these cities
were all very small, Philadelphia being the largest at 50,000
people. A natural leader like Benjamin Franklin could always
go and talk the local Scrooge around if he had to.
In an essentially agricultural society, sailors were an anomaly,
because they were rootless men who didn't belong anywhere. They
would have been called outright vagabonds except for
the fact that when they came ashore, they normally had money
to splash around, having just been paid off. When they had spent
their money, they would normally go around the ships,
looking for berths. Read Herman Melville, and Richard Henry Dana. It
was perfectly normal for a sailor to arrive at Boston, having
shipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, several years previously,
and having been to Africa and China in the
meantime. That was the sailor's way. He hired on by the
voyage. If sailors should get sick on shore, or be put ashore
sick, with no wages, then no captain would want to take them away
again. The founding fathers were forced to
invent something like a modern welfare system to deal with
sailors.
Through some omission, I failed to cite my key sources for the legal
aspects of the last paragraph.
http://commonplace.online/article/sailors-health-national-wealth/?print=print
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Act_for_the_relief_of_sick_and_disabled_seamen
Chris Bray, Discipline and Medicate-- Or, The Problem of Seeing Like
a State, Again, HNN Cliopatria
[pseudonym], Feb 3, 2011
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/136217.html
(now at)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/136217
My response (02/05/2011 09:58 AM)
The Way Courts Work, and Finding a
Judicial Solution.
The mandate is not essential to ObamaCare. It is just that, without
the mandate, or some other compensating arrangement, the insurance
companies get taken to the cleaners. The mandate was probably a dumb
idea in the first place, and, if only the mandate should be
eliminated, the insurance companies will probably use all their
influence on both sides of the aisle to do a more sensible fix. A
more realistic solution would be lowering the Medicare age to,
say, fifty-five, and paying for it out of federal general revenue
and/or the federal deficit. As a practical matter of course,
people who have serious health issues and are not covered under
Medicare tend to be about sixty. Let the insurance
companies insure the younger people who are less likely to file
claims.
In the course of dealing with issues relating to the patent
system, I have become aware of how the federal court system works in
practice, especially in terms of "judge shopping." For example, the
East District of Texas (*) is notorious for favoring
patent-holders, and many of the judges in that court have
blatant conflicts-of-interest. The plaintiffs in
legal cases seek out federal judges who are likely to agree
with them, and get decisions which the are not strictly entitled to,
and then the defendants appeal the cases up to the federal appeals
courts, where the decisions are often thrown out, primarily
because the local favoritism has ceased to operate, or even to the
Supreme Court.
(*) The East District is Longview, Marshall, and Tyler, the
North District is Dallas, the South District is Houston, and
the West District is San Antonio. Thus the East District is a
kind of "rotten borough." At least one of the judges has a
son, a lawyer who practices before the court, who consistently
represents patent interests.
Out of about fifteen federal judges who have been approached in the
matter of the mandate, only one, Judge Vinson of Florida, has
been prepared to rule against ObamaCare in sufficiently broad terms
as to block implementation of the program.
Another federal judge, Judge Hudson of Virgina, has thrown out
the mandate, but presumed severability, and left the remainder
standing. He has presumably taken the reasonable view that if
the legislators had known that he was going to throw out the
mandate, they would simply have picked one of several alternative
means to pay off the insurance companies. Likewise, one assumes that
he has also taken account of the fact that the scene in
the House and Senate chambers was a madhouse, with proponents
of about ten different alternative and mutually incompatible schemes
all screaming at each other. Obviously, under those circumstances,
the bill which resulted was bound to be an unholy mess, without the
kind of logical consistency which judges value. The thing is that
generous majorities of both houses voted for expanding socialized
health insurance in a sizable way. They did not vote for the law of
the jungle so dear to Reason Magazine. A judge with reservations
about particular clauses, such as the mandate, has to take account
of the legislators' underlying intention, and either rule ObamaCare
unconstitutional per se, in terms of its underlying
intentions, or else find a way to shave off its rough edges.
Only about five percent of judges are willing to attack the
ideal of social insurance per se. Most judges are old enough
to be realists about their personal health, and they know,
instinctively, that some kind of system will have to be worked
up, and that this system will have to be reasonably equitable. As
good jurists, they recognize that a principled root-and-branch
attack on ObamaCare must also be a principled root-and-branch attack
on Medicare and Social Security. And they are not Libertarians
or Randians.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_02/027853.php
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/02/03/Judge-tosses-healthcare-reform-challenge/UPI-76011296725400/
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/04/aca-standing/
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