But there are things Trump can do without paying too high a political price while at least improving the government’s fiscal position. I have recommendations that both address the fundamental reasons health care prices behave the way they do and recognize the political and humanitarian reasons we can’t leave people without a reasonable way to obtain the care they need.
First, he has to appoint an adversarial commissioner of food and drugs. By “adversarial,” I do not mean a Bernie Sanders clone who hates all for-profit industries. I mean someone who is not merely a front man for the established multinationals who already control the industry. We need someone who will slash regulations put in place to protect established corporations from competition, but will bolster those which actually protect public safety. If anti-business Europe can get its backlog of generic drugs waiting for approval down to 24, then certainly the FDA can get its backlog down under 1,000 without jeopardizing public health and safety.
More generic competition on the market will naturally bring down drug prices, which are a significant component of overall health care costs. And with an FDA commissioner honestly working for public health, instead of his connected friends, we can expect the war on natural supplements to end, further reducing spending.
The long-discussed federal mandate to the states to allow individuals to buy health insurance over state lines is a good idea. It would be one of the few times since 1913 the federal government actually exercised the power delegated in the Commerce Clause properly. The clause was put into the Constitution to prevent states from charging tariffs on goods crossing their borders. It was about free trade within the United States.
Right now, health insurers get protection from competition from their state governments the same way pharmaceutical companies get protection from the FDA. Let’s let them compete in a freer market, just like they say they want to. When consumers have access to insurance companies in all fifty states—and insurers have access to customers in all fifty states—prices are naturally going to come down.
Third, we need to raise the eligibility age for Medicare to seventy years of age. When Medicare was created in the mid-1960s, average life expectancy was under seventy.23 Today it’s almost eighty.24 That has naturally raised demand for government-subsidized services. On top of that, the ratio of people paying into the system versus those collecting benefits has been cut in half. In 1965, 4.5 working people paid into the system for every one drawing benefits. By 2012, it was only 2.3 people paying in.25 As the baby boomer generation continues to retire, that ratio will keep decreasing for a while.
To deny the eligibility age needs to be raised is to deny reality. A seventy-year-old today is likely to be far healthier and able to work than a sixty-five-year-old was in 1965. By raising the eligibility age, it won’t just help make Medicare solvent; it will decrease artificial demand for health care services in general, which will lower prices. If that’s too academic for you, let me put it another way. It will slow down the gravy train for doctors, hospitals, and drug companies and force them to offer more competitive prices to attract customers who aren’t on the dole!
Co-pays for Medicare and Medicaid benefits will do the same thing. The amount of money collected in co-pays, especially for Medicaid benefits, won’t be the game changer. It is the effect on behavior that will make a difference. When something is absolutely free, consumers place no value on it. They don’t consider whether they truly need to utilize a service before doing so.
Even a $5 co-pay for a low-income Medicaid beneficiary will prompt some consideration before deciding to utilize a service for a minor ailment that might be self-treated. Like I said in the last chapter, I’ve worked for minimum wage. I know how it is.
The costs for Medicaid are shared fifty-fifty between the federal governments and the states. The federal government already allows states to charge a co-pay, within federally mandated limits.26 I say the mandate should be that co-pays are required with federally mandated minimums, with the states free to designate higher co-pays based on their own demographic and utilization data.
These are just a few suggestions that are politically difficult, but not impossible, and would make a measurable difference in the cost of health care. Notice I did not say anything about getting rid of safety nets for the truly poor and disadvantaged. In a perfect free-market world, I’d say abolish them. But for political and humanitarian reasons, I think it’s a waste of time to talk about them in terms of what Trump should try to accomplish in replacing Obamacare.
Whatever additional measures Trump and the Republicans do come up with, they must accomplish what my suggestions here accomplish. They must address the fundamental problems with the health care market before Obamacare was even passed: artificially high demand and artificially low supply. And they must recognize the political reality that going back to that status quo is going to result in the Democrats regaining power with an even stronger mandate for single-payer. Leave the conservative theorizing in the think tank and make sure you get this right for the Eddies out there who need a break.
SAVAGE SOLUTIONS
World War III is being waged by undocumented, unvetted immigrants. Start fighting back!
Purge our shores of enemy combatants and limit World War III to Europe.
Build the border wall now.
Fire the bleeding hearts at CDC and restore sensible public health protocols.
Abolish sanctuary cities and deport the illegal vermin who are killing our citizens.
CHAPTER FOUR
TRUMP’S WAR FOR OUR BORDERS
THE NEW WORLD WAR
Once again, the world is at war. Europe is again bathed in blood thanks to the radical Islamist terrorism that found little resistance under Barack Hussein Obama here in America. He kept right on releasing drug dealers from prison, flooding America with illegal immigrants invited in across our southern border, and planting seedbeds of mayhem all over our nation with his insane refugee program.
And, of course, he commuted the sentence of that all-around rat, Chelsea Manning, who was an Army intelligence officer convicted of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of documents and leaking them to WikiLeaks. Forget that this put our own military and intelligence personnel at risk. She had attempted suicide because she was a transgender woman incarcerated at a male military prison, so Obama commuted her sentence.1
Meanwhile, the psychotic, blood-crazed madwoman Angela Merkel is invading her own nation with murderers, rapists, and thieves. She is a reverse Hitler. Hitler invaded neighboring countries to ethnically cleanse them and impose German culture upon them. Merkel is invading her own country with hordes of Muslims from countries replete with radical Islamic terrorism to ethnically alter her own country, destroy German culture, and replace it with chaos.
The Germans released the truck killer, Anis Amri, from prison. Merkel said “we don’t know if he did it.” A thousand people may have seen him do it, but his DNA was not in the truck. So they let him go.2
On the day of the attack, I told my listeners on The Savage Nation to watch for the Germans blaming a right-winger for the attack. It’s a classic Stasi trick. It would be just like Merkel’s psychotic, socialist police. They released the guy who killed all those people, even after ISIS had taken responsibility and everyone else knew who did it. Why?
I believe Merkel let him go to save her skin. She was up for reelection and her immigration policies were almost universally hated by the German people. If the terror attack were tied to the radical Islamist who actually perpetrated it, it would have been the end of Merkel. The new leadership may just have thrown her in jail for what she did to her country.
But remember Merkel’s background. She is an insider from the old, Eastern European bloc and is a communist through and through. So she took her entire security apparatus, which is extremely powerful, and ran a standard old Stasi trick. She released the terrorist who perpetrated the attack and created a new truth called “We don’t know who did it.” Had she been
able to, she would have found a convenient right-wing patsy to frame for the attack and turn public opinion back in her own favor.
Fortunately for all of us dedicated to saving Western civilization, her plan was foiled. After being released from custody by the communist Merkel, Amri escaped to the Netherlands and eventually ended up in Milan, where he was shot dead after shooting a policeman.3
What we now know about this barbarian shows you just how much wiser the so-called populists were in electing Donald Trump than are the multiculturalist elites who talk down to them. Anis Amri had at least fourteen different aliases4 he used, among other schemes, to collect large amounts of welfare benefits. It also made him harder to find once authorities began looking for him.
Amri is a textbook example of the danger Barry O’s refugee program, which would have been expanded under Hillary Clinton, posed to America. This was one man who became fourteen different killers, bleeding Germany of welfare benefits while pledging allegiance to ISIS and plotting mayhem against the very people who took him in.
I was especially struck by what Amri’s mother said when asked for comment. “I am in shock after hearing the news in the media,” she said. “My son is completely removed from religion. He used to drink alcohol.”5
He wasn’t religious but he pledged allegiance to ISIS. That confirms what I’ve been saying for years. Radical Islam is a violent political movement masquerading as a religion. And until the needed reformation that even moderate Muslims are calling for takes place, radical Islam is Islam.
A few days after the Christmas attack, the Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot in the back on live television by an Islamofascist yelling “Allahu Ahkbar!” But that’s not all he shouted. You didn’t hear the rest of the killer’s message in the liberal media, but I had the translation for my listeners the next day. He went on to say, “We are those who have given a pledge of allegiance to Muhammad that we will carry on jihad.”6 That may offend Anderson Cooper, but that’s what the man said. He was acting in the tradition of jihad that goes right back to Muhammad himself. Who do you think was behind the ambassador’s murder? Do you think it was just a deranged Turkish cop? I don’t. Who do you think it was who drove the truck into the crowd in Germany?
With blood all over the streets of Germany, where are the German men? I see people who look like German men. They talk like German men. But where are the German fighters who were as tough as any in the world? What happened to them?
I’ll tell you what happened. They were beaten to death by the radical feminist, socialist left. That’s just what would have happened in this country if God had not intervened and given us Donald Trump.
Trump’s election has ushered in a “new world order,” but not the one the radical feminist socialists thought they had locked up with Hillary Clinton’s election.
Yes, I have been critical of some of Trump’s appointments, but never of him. I truly believe it was God’s hand that saved us from Merkel’s twin sister, the evil one, Hillary Clinton. Just remember how lucky we are to have Donald Trump instead of her.
Trump has put one military man after another into all those top positions for a reason. He knows World War III is already under way. It’s not a conventional war like World War II. It’s a war to save Western civilization from the barbaric, anti-civilization elements in both the radical left and radical Islam.
The enemy doesn’t come in uniform, marching next to tanks or flying in fighter jets. They come as refugees and immigrants, appealing to the bleeding hearts of liberals who let them walk into the country without firing a shot and then wait for their moment to strike. How many Anis Amris did Barack Hussein bring into America during his eight-year reign of terror?
But while World War III is different from World War II in the way it’s fought, there is one crucial similarity. Just as the United States emerged relatively unscathed from World War II because we kept it away from our shores, so must we keep World War III away from our shores. The Islamofascists have already taken over Europe, just as Hitler had by the time the United States entered World War II. But Hitler never came to America. He was never even able to conquer England, thanks to Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain. Hitler was kept in Europe and North Africa and eventually defeated there.
Unfortunately, the situation in our present world war is not so cut and dried. England is already greatly compromised by the same kinds of insane immigration policies the rest of Europe has enacted. Even the United States has pockets of Islamofascist sleeper cells waiting to strike. But we haven’t been overrun the way Germany has, at least not yet.
The terror you are seeing there would be visiting us here if not for Trump winning. Now Trump must stand firm against the liberals and the RINOs, both of whom have demonstrated their commitment to erasing the borders of the United States of America.
While we may be fighting a new kind of war, the precedent for ruling elites to attack the borders, language, and culture of the populations they rule is thousands of years old. Let me enlighten you on some history you weren’t taught in your socialist, multiculturalist, environmentalist public school.
ANCIENT MASS POPULATION CHANGES
You may be familiar with the Babylonian exile story in the Old Testament. After Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem for the Babylonians, he marched most of the population off to the Babylonian homeland. According to the biblical account, the Jews were later allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild Solomon’s Temple.
What you may not know is that mass deportations like this were fairly routine in the ancient world.7 It didn’t just happen to the Jews; it happened to most conquered peoples. Not only would conquering emperors march the existing population out of the conquered territory, but they would march populations from a different conquered territory in. There were many reasons for this, but one is intuitive. By separating conquered peoples from their homelands, they were easier to control.
Not only are people with long ties to the land they reside on more willing to defend it against enemies; they are more resistant to centralized control by a distant capital. They build up long-standing legal and cultural traditions that form the basis for local self-government.
This is the argument Thomas Jefferson made in his Summary View of the Rights of British America against taxation and legislation by the British Parliament. He didn’t merely say the colonists rejected Parliament’s legislation because the colonies weren’t represented. He also said they didn’t want to be represented in Parliament; that, in fact, they could never be represented in Parliament. That’s because their long-standing tradition of legislation by their own local assemblies was the basis of their liberty.
Only a blind man could fail to see the parallel to what governments all over the West are doing now and what ancient conquering emperors did. By importing mass populations from alien, hostile cultures and deliberately planting them throughout their countries, Western nations are fundamentally changing the existing populations. Allowed to continue, the populations of Europe and the United States will no longer be the same peoples who have existed there for hundreds or thousands of years and who built long-standing traditions of liberty and local self-government.
This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with culture. In Government Zero, I told you about “Little Mogadishu” in Minnesota. That population has no long-standing tradition of local self-government or individual liberty. These refugees from an alien culture, whose offspring will be American citizens, hold beliefs that conflict with the long-standing local traditions that form the basis of local self-government for the rest of Minnesota. If the process that brought them there continues, at some point the culture and traditions of the former population disappears. With them goes their liberty.
It’s always a tough call, determining whether the liberal elites who enact these policies are attacking America and the West deliberately or are just too detached from reality in their ivory towers to see how disastrous their policies are. But regardless of whether
it is deliberate or not, the result is the same. The populations and culture of the West are being artificially and fundamentally changed. It seems awfully coincidental that the new populations would be less likely to resist the borderless, globalist new world order where international boards of unelected bureaucrats regulate the political and economic lives of everyone on the planet.
BUILD THE WALL
Trump drew millions of new supporters to massive rallies during his presidential campaign. They recognized in him someone who would finally fight for the American people on trade, religious freedom, infrastructure, and jobs. But they didn’t chant “Build that bridge!” or “Cut those taxes!” at his rallies. They recognized the first and most important reason they were voting for Trump. They chanted, “Build a wall!”8
It’s no accident that the one thing the people want most, that is most in their interest, is the Trump policy facing the most resistance from the Establishment. Since the day Trump announced his candidacy, Democrats and most Republicans have opposed the will of the people on Trump’s Wall. The elites know regaining control of the borders is the first step to ending their corrupt regime.
As I said in the opening chapter of this book, one of the things Trump must fight is the temptation to backpedal, to go along to get along. Immediately after the election, he was starting to say it might be a fence in places,9 while the RINOs quickly jumped in saying, “It’s not realistic.”10 Trump was already feeling the pressure and his first instinct was to compromise. That’s the businessman in him doing what he’s done all his life to get things done in the business world.
Trump's War Page 6