Yep, can’t argue there. I mean Paul.

RpR, I have never seen anything involving Pee Wee Herman. Can you explain the rubber/glue thing?

Look it up, you make all kinds of statements about the U.S. based on ignorance as the facts are not easy to find but finding out who/what PeeWee Herman is represents is very, very easy.

RpR………….. Still puzzled why Thump doesn’t want a wall to the north of the US. Aliens can enter from Canada, or of course, it could be an escape route for those don’t want to live in Thump’s America……!!!

Puzzled only because the facts do not fit your beliefs.
I will give you a pass as you are not aware of the terrain of the Canadian border either.
It is not hundreds of miles of open emptiness but if you wish to continue with your obtuse comments based ignorance you are welcome to it.

I think the chances of another Sep 11 have grown enormously overnight.

Reported by whom?

Good to see Mr Trump act so decisively to counter a major threat to US citizens.

After all some 24 people have been killed by terrorists in the US over the last ten years. You can’t allow that sort of carnage to continue, can you?

Moggy

Hmmm, so you prefer another Sept. 11th scenario before action is taken, brilliant.

What happens as you get older and, almost inevitably, will need more medical care; is that covered by some sort of state care? Irrespective of how fit we are, or think we are, we are all living longer, medical techniques are advancing, and will all need (very expensive) ‘end of life’ care. —- Now, I am not sure as the system is going to get another overhaul to fix what Obama screwed up.
Each state has its own system so before Obama Care there were fifty different medical plans. State could have refused Obama Care but if they did they would be cut off from millions of dollars of Fed. help that was there before Obama Care. It was take this deal of we cut you off.
I am amazed that so many people my age, sixties, are on a permanent prescription routine. I am not and despite busting myself up, am quite healthy. I fell off a ladder a few years back and that fixed a crick in my back that I got years ago from lifting too many items that weighed well over one hundred pounds.
Even each county in Minn. at least had different sub-plans.
I found out the same year I fell off the ladder when while standing bare foot on a very slanted roof to do eave repair that shingles can have little bits of probably glass fiber that will pierce even feet bottoms.
After fixing the eave , I doctored my foot with a dull knife, making it worse, I went to see a doctor.
All I got was a nurse practitioner, who gave me some salve to put on it. I asked her how much the visit was, and was going to pay.
She asked if I had insurance and I said no. She gave me a form to fill out that gave me ninety days free health care . (This was created to cover welfare persons and the influx of refugees Minn. had brought in, Yes, the State brought them in, and my county has ninety percent of them. Even now go into a waiting room and eight out of ten patients are Somalis.)
So the visit was free which was good as even though I could have gone back, as it was not fixed, I got out a sharp item cut around the infected area and pulled it out myself several day later. Damn deep sharp tiny little barb that stung like hell when I pulled it out.
That is all gone under Obama Care.

I’m still not sure I understand the complexities of the healthcare ‘system’ (or systems!) in the United States; without purposely investigating it the overriding impression (from the mainstream media) in the United Kingdom is that Obama-Care was a universally ‘good’ thing (and was something akin to our own NHS) because more people were covered by insurance. —-

But from what you say, it seems that in actual fact the (commercial) health-insurance companies were effectively being forced by the government to accept everybody into their existing schemes (I think)? I can see how such a piece of Federal legislation would upset the commercially planned operations of the insurance companies, and, if these companies aren’t legally obliged to provide healthcare within a certain State, then the simplest commercial option for the company would be to withdraw cover from a State entirely (or to drastically restructure cover). I hope I’ve got that right?

You are correct they had two choices, accept clients in their legal area, or quit. They are quitting, and something that is occasionally mentioned, due to the huge amount of paper work doctors must now fill out, for each patient, many senor doctors are taking no new patients.
Doctors can refuse to be part of a insurance company and now many are simply leaving the practice.
Sharon, thank God, has a wonderful doctor, but she now has him because the one she had for decades said to hell with this new coming bs and retired. He was not even in his sixties yet. She found the new one after quitting several others, before Obama Care was in force in Minn.
There is far more to the health care system as being self employed puts you in a totally different category both federally and under Minn. State rules but the fact she was self employed was also by the grace of God, one of the reasons the system did not **** on her.
She came in JUST under the wire.

There were problems before but Obama Care was set-up so that others paid for the insurance of those who were not covered before by being forced to get insurance, or failing to do that, get fined so that the government was not left holding the bag to pay for those newly insured.
The major item, and this had been given, fake attention before by politicians, i.e. they say they will fix it while campaigning and then do nothing about it, is unlike car insurance which can cross state lines creating competitive market, health insurance can not legally cross state line.
Only those companies the Fed. government approved for your state could/can offer health insurance in your state. So they had a captive market and could charge what ever they wanted as they knew no company could compete with them.
Under Obama Care the number, in Minn. has shrank, as some of the few that were here said to hell with it and pulled out.
Trump has said he is going to change that so health insurance is as competitive as car insurance, that is one item that weighed heavily in his being elected and long term politicians who paid this item only lip service being voted out.

If I wanted to read a Fox opinion piece I’d lobotomise myself and type it into the browser with my bleeding forehead.

If you do not like it, do not read it Personal comment deleted. This is a monitored thread

Andrew Napolitano: Trump has committed the most revolutionary act I’ve seen in 45 years.

Within four hours of becoming president of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to limit immediately the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) in ways that are revolutionary.

With the stroke of a pen, the president assaulted the heart of the law that was the domestic centerpiece of his predecessor’s administration. How did this happen? How can a U.S. president, who took an oath to enforce the laws faithfully, gut one of them merely because he disagrees with it?

Here is the back story.

When Obama Care went through Congress in 2010, all Democrats in Congress supported it and all congressional Republicans were opposed. The crux of their disagreement was the law’s command that everyone in the United States obtain and maintain health insurance — a command that has come to be known as “the individual mandate.”

Republicans argued that Congress was without the authority to compel people to enter the marketplace by purchasing a product — that such decisions should be freely made by individuals and that that freedom was protected from governmental interference by the Constitution. Democrats argued that the commerce clause of the Constitution, which permits Congress to regulate commerce among the states, also permits it to compel commercial activity on the part of individuals who make up a highly regulated component of interstate commerce.

To ensure compliance with the individual mandate, the law provided that the IRS would collect the fair market value of a bare-bones insurance policy from those who did not obtain and maintain one. The government would then take that money and purchase a health insurance policy for that individual who rejected the law’s command.

Though Congress did not call it a tax and the government’s lawyers uniformly and consistently denied in all courts where it was challenged that it was a tax and President Barack Obama rejected the idea that it was a tax and even the lawyers for the challengers denied it was a tax, a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court characterized the money collected by the IRS from noncompliant individuals as a tax.

This is profoundly significant for constitutional purposes because though Congress cannot regulate anything it wants, Congress can tax anything it wants, as long as the tax falls equally on those in the class of people who are paying it. This unheard-of characterization of a non-tax as a tax was necessary to salvage Obama Care before the high court because a different 5-4 majority in the same case ruled that the Republican congressional argument was essentially correct — that the commerce clause does not empower Congress to compel commercial activity.

All of this has been debated loud and long since the law was enacted in 2010, validated by the Supreme Court in 2012 and came into Trump’s crosshairs in the Republican presidential primaries and again in the general election campaign.

Trump argued that the government cannot compel commercial activity, even as part of a large regulatory scheme, because the Constitution protects everyone’s right to purchase a lawful good or not to purchase one. He also asserted that Obama Care does not make economic sense because its regulation of the practice of medicine and its administration of health insurance have resulted in a diminution of choices for consumers, which in turn has raised premiums, as well as deductibles, and chased primary care physicians from the marketplace. The Obama mantra that you could keep your doctor and your health insurance under Obama Care proved to be patently false, Trump argued.

When Trump promised that as president — on “day one” — he would begin to dismantle Obama Care, some Republicans, many members of the press and most Democrats laughed at him. They are laughing no longer because the first executive order he signed on Jan. 20 directed those in the federal government who enforce Obama Care to do so expecting that it will soon not exist.

He ordered that regulations already in place be enforced with a softer, more beneficent tone, and he ordered that no penalty, fine, setoff or tax be imposed by the IRS on any person or entity who is not complying with the individual mandate, because by the time taxes are due on April 15, the IRS will be without authority to impose or collect the non-tax tax, as the individual mandate will no longer exist. Why take money from people that will soon be returned?

Then he ordered a truly revolutionary act, the likes of which I have never seen in the 45 years I have studied and monitored the government’s laws and its administration of them. He ordered that when bureaucrats who are administering and enforcing the law have discretion with respect to the time, place, manner and severity of its enforcement, they should exercise that discretion in favor of individuals and against the government.

This is radical coming from any president in the modern era of government-can-do-no-wrong. It is far more Thomas Jefferson, the small-government champion with whom Trump has never been associated, than it is Theodore Roosevelt, the super-regulator whom Trump has stated he admires. It recognizes the primacy and dignity of the individual and the fallibility of the state. It acknowledges the likely demise of Obama Care. It is utterly without precedent since Jefferson’s presidency.

Trump’s revolutionary act is a breeze of freedom on a sea of regulation. It recognizes something modern governments never admit — that they can be and have been wrong. It is exactly as Trump promised.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey.