A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Losing ground in the polls, Hillary Clinton attacks Bernie Sanders’ support of single-payer health care. No surprise here — HRC never has liked single-payer health care — but plenty of sleaze. And Sanders’ plan may have a dangerous defect (a defect that can be fixed easily).
HRC, and her daughter, Chelsea (married to a multimillionaire investment gambler banker), claim that Sanders’ Medicare for All plan would raise taxes on the middle class and strip people of their health insurance. Would it raise taxes? Yes — but the extra taxes would be more than offset by the elimination of premiums for private health insurance because those premiums include profit for the private insurers. Would Medicare for All strip people of health insurance? No. It would rescue them from private health insurance.
But Sanders’ plan may have a defect. In the past, he’s proposed having the states administer the program, possibly as a concession meant to entice the states into supporting a single-payer system. Whatever the rationale, it’s a damned stupid idea. Having 50 different systems is a prescription for chaos and sabotage. But the cure is easy: Medicare for All should be a federally administered, everyone covered for everything, zero dollar (no deductibles, no copays), single-payer system financed by progressive taxation.
So why are HRC and Chelsea misrepresenting Sanders’ single-payer proposal? Because HRC’s ultimate goal in life is not bettering our nation. It’s bettering HRC. She’ll do anything to win.
Does Canadian born Ted Cruz meet the Constitution’s requirement that only natural born citizens can be President? Possibly not. The eligibility criteria for the Presidency are in the fifth paragraph of Article II, Section 1:
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
Cruz meets the age and residency requirements, but whether he meets the natural born citizen requirement depends on how “natural born citizen” is defined. The Constitution’s authors adopted the phrase from English common law. University of Delaware law professor Mary Brigid McManamon argues, in both a Washington Post oped, and a 2015 scholarly paper, Cruz does not satisfy the natural born citizen requirement as it was understood by the Constitution’s authors. Tierney Sneed has more at Talking Points Memo.
Trevor Potter, a former Federal Elections Commission chairman who led legal point for John McCain (born in the Panama Canal Zone) on whether McCain was a natural born citizen, told Talking Points Memo:
“One American parent and one foreign parent; a birth in a foreign country and not on a U.S. base; and not while the parents were in the service of the nation; dual citizenship for an entire adult life — all of those facts are certainly different from Senator McCain’s case,” Potter said.
Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has settled the meaning of natural born citizen as it pertains to eligibility to be President. There are arguments both ways, but McManamon makes a credible case that Cruz’s circumstances make him a naturalized rather than a natural born citizen. The issue needs to be resolved, and the sooner the better.
Whether a President should be a natural born citizen is a different question. I favor the requirement. In a nation of 320 million, there should be no shortage of natural born citizens who meet the Constitutional and practical qualifications to be President.