Every few weeks, leftist supporters of Obamacare will float the “fact” that our founders passed the first “national health care law” claiming that this supports Obamacare. The truth is, though, the history they claim supports them doesn’t in any way prove that the founders would approve of mandates in general or Obamacare in particular.
This failed historical analogy is once again seen this month in the prattling of one Einer Elhauge, a fellow who claims for himself the title of professor at Harvard Law School. If his recent article in The New Republic is any indication of the level of history he teaches students, we have yet another example of our failed state of higher education.
Elhauge makes two failed analogies to history in his support of Obamacare. One is the 1792 law that required men to own a firearm. This law passed by many members of our founding generation — with only four opposing the mandate — proves, Elhauge claims, that mandates were not something the founders would oppose.
Elhauge’s claim is facile, of course. After all, we had no standing army at the time (in fact the founders were vehemently against a standing army), and the whole of the people in the form of the militia were the army.
So, requiring people to own firearms was, at the time, observing the Constitutional mandate to protect the nation. Healthcare is not something in the Constitution and cannot be construed as such, so Elhauge’s extrapolating military matters to Obamacare is absurd on its face.
Then there is the Sailor Relief Act that lefties have been harping on for several years now, claiming that it supports Obamacare. This, too, is a facile comparison cynically and illicitly used to defend Obamacare.
Even as today’s leftists want to use this old sailor’s act as poof that nationalized health care has precedent, and even as they are wrong, the history does serve us well as an example of the follies of nationalized health care. Curiously enough, it’s a lesson that the leftists don’t seem to mention in their laudatory pieces on the law.
The law in question is the “act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen,” passed in 1798.
This law mandated owners of sailing vessels to pay a per-sailor tax to the federal government so that members of the merchant marine could find temporary health care when they got sick. The act informed the nation that the president is “hereby authorized, out of the same, to provide for the temporary relief and maintenance of sick, or disabled seamen, in the hospitals or other proper institutions…”
Now, the modern American left claims that this was the first “health care mandate.” They imagine that this law was the first version of Obamacar, and that this is somehow precedent for Obama’s modern, socialist power grab.
A closer look at this ancient law fails the test as support for Obamacare.
First of all, the very first paragraph of the original act puts the lie to the left’s claims.
Be it enacted, That from and after the first day of September next, the master or owner of every ship or vessel of the United States, arriving from a foreign port into any port of the United States, shall, before such ship or vessel shall be admitted to an entry, render to the collector a true account of the number of seamen that shall have been employed on board such vessel since she was last entered at any port in the United States, and shall pay, to the said collector, at the rate of twenty cents per month for every seaman so employed ; which sum he is hereby authorized to retain out of the wages of such seamen.
And thus we see that this law was an employer mandate, not a personal mandate. The law required employers of the sailors to pay the tax, not the sailor’s themselves. Nor did this tax fall on people outside the maritime services. This is quite unlike Obamacare. In Obamacare we are all going to pay, not just our employers, not just people in the health care field, and not just the sick.
The 1798 act goes on to state that the president may appoint people to oversee the implementation of the act; it tells the president what to do with the monies, how to handle surplus collections, and even authorizes him to build facilities if needed. The act even sets up a fine for ship owners that are found to have lied to the tax collectors about how many sailors they employed.
All this might seem to support parts of Obamacare, until one realizes that such enforcement and directions are common to every law. Nothing there is really very specific to the support of Obamacare.
Now, to further flesh out the history, we must look at the era–what the merchant marines then meant to the nation, and all the other facts surrounding the sailor’s relief act, so that we might properly understand it and put the law in context. This exercise also tends to prove that the modern left is wrong to use this act as proof of the legality of Obamacare.
First and foremost we must understand that the maritime services in the private sector in 1798 was the most vital national interest we had. It didn’t just serve an economic interest, either. It was also a matter of national security. You see, the U.S. lacked a thorough national navy and army in 1798, and the merchant marines served as our first line of defense then.
Our international trade was our national lifeline. In those days, the federal government paid its expenditures solely off tariffs (taxes) on trade. There were no taxes on Americans that paid the government’s operating expenses. Without regular trade constantly flowing from Europe to America, the federal government went without operating cash.
So, making sure these sailors had health care was a vital national economic and military interest. This is quite unlike Obamacare.
Clearly, one of the constitutional duties the federal government has is to regulate trade. In fact, the Articles of Confederation — the pact that held the nation together before the U.S. Constitution was ratified — had a singular failure, in that the national government had no power to stop the states from engaging in harmful trade wars amongst each other. And these little internecine wars were killing the economies of the states before the Constitution put a stop to it. This is why the Constitution gave the federal government power over trade, taking that power away from the states.
Consequently, we are all agreed that the Constitution has the power to regulate trade, and the sailor’s relief act was an action within that duty. Again, if the sailors were all too sick to work, then trade was harmed. Trade, being a vital national interest, and trade, being regulated by the Constitution, gave congress the right to enact the sailor’s relief law.
There is no such vital trade connection with Obamacre. There just isn’t.
Finally, the sailor’s relief act specifically stated that the health care to be given was to be of “temporary relief” of the sailor’s medical problems. The act was not meant to cover all health care problems, nor any chronic health problems. If sailors were found to be chronically ill, or needed major health care expenditures, they were not supposed to receive the benefits of this program. This is quite unlike Obamacare, in that today’s health care law is supposed to cover anything and everything.
Now that we’ve successfully destroyed every part of the left’s claims that the sailor’s relief act fits the Obamacare template, there is one other aspect to highlight: the costs.
As it happens, even the sailor’s relief act was a financial failure. By 1821 the program was bankrupt and had strayed badly from its original mandate.
In 1821, U.S. Treasury Secretary William Crawford found that the program was a disaster. He wrote a letter to explain how bad it had gotten, a letter that should serve as a major warning as we contemplate implementing another such disastrous program in Obamacare.
Crawford explained that sailors that were chronically ill were getting care when they shouldn’t have. He also noted that the program was spending far more than it took in, leading to a deficit spending problem. He recommended that steps be taken to kick out any sailor that didn’t just need short term health care and warned health care providers to stop all care once the tax money ran out and to only resume it again when the coffers were re-filled by tax receipts.
So, in essence, Sec. Crawford set up a sort of “death panel” by decreeing that chronically ill sailors should be cut off from services. He also decreed that poor — or pauper — sailors should not be allowed services. That’s right, the government cut off health care to those that “needed it most.” Just as Obamacare supporters today blame the evil insurance companies for doing.
Yet the left points to this act as proof that Obamacare is legitimate?
One shudders at the thought.
The fact is, the sailor’s relief act is not in any way like Obamacare, nor does it serve to justify Obama’s socialist health care power grab.
Once again, we find the American left wholly misunderstanding history, misusing it for their modern power grabs, and otherwise refusing to properly inform the public about the smoke and mirrors they are employing to fool all of the people, all of the time.
Finally, in a side note, it seems that gun control issues are about to be a factor for the left. Not only did The New Republic hit the gun control issue (if only briefly), so did Salon, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and others.
If the left is about to start pushing Obama toward gun control when he’s spent the first four years ignoring it, this is yet another reason to vote him out of office.
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