34.4 F
Chicago
Saturday, March 25, 2023
HomeHealth CareDi Leo: Sergeant York and the Affordable Care Act

Di Leo: Sergeant York and the Affordable Care Act

Date:

spot_img

Hosp
Di Leo ties World War I and health care analogies to make an important point about the ACA

By John F. Di Leo - 

Reflections on Enemies, Warriors, and Duty…

As I write these words, hundreds of Republican, libertarian, and independent politicians, civil servants, and think tank analysts on Capitol Hill are working to finally overturn the monstrous law called the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.  And just as many Democrats are working just as feverishly to thwart the effort.

Now, before we get into the details, we should first begin by considering a crucial issue: Obamacare is a misnomer: it's not REALLY Obama's program.

Barack Obama didn't write the bill (in all his years as a legislator, he’s never written a major bill). Barack Obama just did the necessary lying to sell it, and then he signed it once it was passed. It is a product of the Democrat Congressional caucus and the socialist think tank arena, written and created by the Democrat party as a whole.

We must mention this because there is a very serious risk that, once it's repealed, people will forget that Barack Obama’s entire corrupt party deserves the blame for it, forever, and people will instead associate it only with Barack Obama. 

And that would be very dangerous to the republic, because the left will raise the idea again, in a decade or two, and then they will claim that the flaw was only in how one man implemented it.

So we must always remember that the flaw of the ACA is at the heart of the concept itself, not in how it was implemented, or after whom it was named.

The ACA represents the modern Democratic approach to government better than most issues, and it has brought them all into public view:

  • The belief that liberal philosophy outranks the morals and interests of private citizens…
  • The belief that the public sector is inherently superior to the private sector, despite all evidence…
  • The belief that outright lying in support of a hated program is not only acceptable, but heroic…
  • The belief that when millions of individuals suffer, and when millions of companies shrink, flee or collapse, it MUST be because they deserved to.

Only modern Democrat politicians, bureaucrats and analysts – utterly divorced from the real world due to a lifetime in politics – think like that!

World War I and the German Guns

Do you remember the story of Sergeant Alvin York, the subject of a great 1941 movie starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan?

During the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in World War I, Alvin York’s squad identified a range of German machine gun nests firing at the American line, so he almost singlehandedly took them out… shooting them with his rifle, then with his pistol, then taking 130 German prisoners.

Alvin York led the team that saved hundreds of American lives that day, and enabled our offensive to move forward in that area, by shutting down those machine gun nests.  His heroism won him the Distinguished Service Cross, later upgraded to a Medal of Honor.

These machine gun nests were trained on our troops, stopping our movement forward, taking American lives.  They were the very definition of an anti-American, enemy installation.

In a modern analogy, the ACA is also an anti-American enemy installation.  The ACA has been a veritable range of machine gun nests with unlimited ammunition, constantly firing on the American people now for almost seven years straight.

Lest you think this is too extreme an analogy, please consider the full effects of the ACA since its unconstitutional “passage” in March, 2010. 

Instead of the normal economic boom that follows severe recessions, the American economy has been flat for seven years.  Barack Obama is the only president to end two terms without EVER having served during a quarter with even three percent economic growth.

After the 2007-2008 recession that started with the Democrat takeover of the House in 2006, the nation quickly hit bottom and then never came back.  All honest analysts will confirm that the primary cause of this stagnation has been this ghastly healthcare nationalization.

This oppressive healthcare mandate – and its resulting state and federal programs and bureaucracies – are a range of machine gun nests, which have been killing jobs, killing businesses, killing new business start-ups, killing doctors' offices and insurance companies and medical clinics, for seven years now. 

The ACA has turned full time employees into part timers, forced manufacturers to move offshore, denied coverage to individuals by operating death panels, rendered manufacturers unable to compete with foreign sources, or simply bankrupted people by doubling, trebling, quadrupling their insurance costs – for seven painful years.

The very day it was passed and signed, companies started adjusting their operations, moving production lines, giving up expansion plans, slowing or stopping hiring, looking overseas for less painful options.

And the day it is fully repealed – the day when the mandate is removed, and insurance costs can go back to normal – those businesses and entrepreneurs will again be free to operate in the United States.

The Republican Party is today's Sergeant York.  The Republican majorities in the House and Senate voted this week to repeal the ACA… to finally take out that machine gun nest and free our economy from its horror.

Resistance from Within

Now… we must turn a bit from the actual history and imagine an alternative spin on our analogy for a moment. 

When Sergeant York was a sniper – on our side – taking aim and working to take out those German machine gun nests… what if some of his fellow American soldiers had tried to knock his rifle out of his hands, and to steal his pistol from its holster during the action? 

This didn’t happen, of course… but what if it did?

What if some of his fellow Americans had tried to thwart his efforts to protect the American line from those enemy guns?

I know.  We can’t imagine such a thing.  Their colleagues were being killed; they themselves were being shot at… of course, they were overjoyed to support Sergeant York’s efforts. 

But if it happened… if these fellow American soldiers had tried to thwart Sergeant York’s heroism… What names would come to mind, to describe such obstructionists?

Traitors.  Killers.  Moles.  Turncoats. 

Yes, those are the names.

And as the Republicans work around the clock to save Americans from ACA… that is EXACTLY what Democrat politicians, bureaucrats, and the talking heads on television are trying to do.

Rather than acknowledging their failure, rather than admitting to the unprecedented destruction of human lives that the ACA has caused… Democrat politicians want that machine gun nest to remain in place, because they are more interested in their policies, their love of big government, their love of regulatory control, their ongoing effort to lower everyone in America to the lowest common denominator. 

Yes, even if that means continuing to destroy American jobs and American lives forever.  

…because the expansion of government and the reduction of personal freedom and prosperity are exactly what today’s Democratic Party exists to do.

Thank Heaven, real Americans outnumber the Democrats enough in Washington today, so we can do our job without their being able to thwart us this time.

We must never forget these experiences, and these images.

And we must never allow our government to erect such a chain of machine gun nests again.

Copyright 2017 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based Customs broker, international trade trainer, writer and actor.  A former president of the Ethnic American Council and vice chairman of the Greater Chicagoland Young Americans for Freedom, he has been a recovering politician for almost twenty years now.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.

Subscribe

- Never miss a story with notifications

- Gain full access to our premium content

- Browse free from up to 5 devices at once

Latest stories

8 COMMENTS

  1. One need only look at what ACA did to persons with medicare part D prescription plans… for allot of retirees, their prescriptions are un-affordable because of the high premiums, deductibles and copay/coinsurance costs. Like the cost of healthcare, its cost has doubled Many living on fixed incomes are having to make very difficult decisions. Thanks to the socialist Obama administration, the democrats and ACA.
    Sergeant York is a movie that is among my dvd collection… its a longtime favorite of mine.

  2. the donut hole payment part of ACA is on the chopping block with no replacement so far. A lot of older folks are going to start experiencing that once again if they don’t think of something.
    But no worries I’m sure one of the 20 or so families receiving the 20 million ACA tax cut will foot those bills on their own and not invest in outside the country. no worries.

  3. The demented, god-cursed LEFT will try to deny Trump, lie about him, obstruct him, and hurt him at every single turn—and this includes hurting ordinary people like you and me.
    —And MY LIFE MATTERS! (MLM!)
    And so does yours, and the lives of your families. These are times that try our souls. Lift up the banner of of your sacred honor, life, liberty, and Fortune’s favor:
    ????If the left’s lips are moving, they are apparently lying or deluded. The same applies to their supporters, enablers, Fake Newsers, and advocates.
    Don’t buy their CDs or the products they hawk on TV, don’t go to their inane movies, don’t visit their stupid sites, don’t listen to them on the radio.
    Don’t watch them on their Fake News TV, don’t buy tickets to see them do ANYthing, and especially don’t watch or attend their dumb, leftist-activist “shows.”
    Are they the oily, lying, “Shmuck Shroomer,” political type?
    Or the lying, insane, “You can Keep Your Doctor,” I-rule-the-world, type?
    Or the “Pajama Boy,” t-Shirted, Marxist-indoctrinated, spoiled, over “educated,” multi-multi-billionaire, web or silicon mogul type?
    Or the blathering, “Holy,” Islamist, devoutly corrupt, Marxist, “priestly” type, from some other world?
    Or the radical, leftist, multi-millionaire, arrogant, self-agrandizing “media” liar type?
    If so, they would be your leftist, Islamist, One-World, slave-master wannabes. Your Rulers in waiting. And they are coming after you and your family, just as they are coming after Donald Trump and his family.
    And…you have only to see the bloated, vacuous, debauched-looking face of their newest poster shill, John “The Tea Party Spit On Me” Louse,” the failed, “great civil rights leader,” to see how they roll in their own, filthy, stinking lies about Donald Trump and you.
    Their despicable “heroes,” like John Louse, and—Her The Stumbling Zombie Witch of New York—they demonstrate they stop at Nothing to grasp and clutch at their rotting, stinking, filthy goals for YOU.
    Don’t believe any lying word they say. Ignore their lies. Defund them; block their plots.
    “Find them; fix them in place; isolate them; and ridicule them.” (To paraphrase their leader, Saul Alinksky)
    Think: would you maybe wipe them out financially, or have them praising Trump, in about 6 weeks? ????????
    .
    Will you pass these ideas onward and forward to your mailing lists and resources? It’s your Move, isn’t it?
    .
    .

  4. LOL… still telling Obama’s 20 million without insurance lie! That was totally discredited years ago. Your comment makes no sense, typical of the liberal left not taking responsibility for harming old people with their commie policies.
    This fact remains! One need only look at what ACA did to persons with medicare part D prescription plans… for allot of retirees, their prescriptions are un-affordable because of the high premiums, deductibles and copay/coinsurance costs slammed on them by ACA mandates.

  5. Hey, “no really!”
    Speaking of medals, did Obama give you the “Medal of Freedom” yet?
    If Biden can have one, anyone can, even you.
    If Obama can have a Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing, where is yours?

  6. Obama is gone. He’ll be remembered as the 21st century Jimmy Carter the worst pres of my life prior to BO, except with a tie-in during Black History Month. I am hopeful of a true conservative agenda headed by a righteous leader but will see what happens over the next few months before buying in. The last five + decades of American History (with the blessed exception of the Reagan Era) have been entirely “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”

  7. I have one minor disagreement. True, 0bama didn’t write it, but he changed it several times on his own in several different ways.
    Other than that, you hit the nail directly on the head and I don’t think my observation negates or minimizes you points at all.