Americans’ attention spans divide sharply among issues, controversies, and opinions, abounding on every side, assailing from every direction. The dearth of common goals and actions toward preserving and keeping the Republic alive will, in fact, shortly bring about the end of the Republic, and with it the end of the American dream, the Rule of Law, and any hope of prosperity and survival. It is now the time to decide and to act.
While we are all fixated on our concerns, very few have noticed the most destructive danger we face. Indeed, we have allowed this danger to grow without surcease for fifty years or more, and have rarely been interested to examine the source of the problems, or the damage they cause to the GDP, to federal and State budgets, and most particularly to our personal incomes, our health, and our prospects toward a future for America. For the overwhelming majority of us, as America goes, we go, for good or ill.
“Managing healthcare cost” has been the focus of multiple laws, policies, and practices, for as long as we remember. Indeed, these costs have grown exponentially for at least fifty years, and despite all past legislation the growth continues. As the costs increase production suffers, as does our actual standard of living. This single element of the economy right now has power to destroy this Republic, and all of us with it.
The critical step we now must take is to bring healthcare costs under check, decrease them rapidly, and free the economy and the budgets to function as they must. We will not accomplish these goals by passing new laws. Laws succeed only when they are enforced. Witness the huge number of laws on the books, both federally and in the States, and particularly laws whose intent is to prevent antitrust actions on the part of individuals, companies, and corporations.
The laws exist, but executive branches of governments fail to enforce those laws, thereby making them in a practical sense null and void. The federal body of law governing antitrust is 15 U.S.C. § 1, and includes the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), the Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), the Robinson-Patman Anti-Discrimination Act (1936), and the Celler-Kefauver Act (1950). These are the laws left unenforced by Presidents and Departments of Justice, and that failure to enforce these laws allows the entire medical industry, including health insurance, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, clinics, and doctors to continue the process of destroying the economy and the Republic. These are the laws that must be enforced, and yet they have not been enforced to any lasting effect toward controlling the “costs of medical care”.
Truly enforcing 15 U.S.C. § 1 would result in indictments, prosecutions, judgments (civil/criminal), both convictions and punishments (criminal), and very likely the destruction of the entire medical cartel. More, enforcement would bring actual hope for reducing medical costs radically and rapidly.
This is the critical step that we must take, that cannot be ignored, that failure to take will cost us the Republic, our lives, and our health. We must take this step, and now.
Will we take this critical step?
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