Di Leo: Sergeant York and the Affordable Care Act

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We must mention this because there is a very serious risk that, once it's repealed, people will forget that Barack Obama’s entire corrupt party deserves the blame for it, forever, and people will instead associate it only with Barack Obama.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

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