Tom McGinley, Author at TheAmericanCitizen.org

Fort McHenry and the Star Spangled Banner

January 25, 2025August 28, 2020 by Tom McGinley

I wrote this essay that was originally published by the American Thinker on September 14, 2014, the 200th anniversary of Francis Scott Key’s writing of the Star Spangled Banner.

Given that Vice-President Pence gave his Republican VP nomination acceptance speech at Fort McHenry last evening, the site of the famed battle with the British Navy in Baltimore Harbor late in the War of 1812, I thought I’d re-publish the article and the story behind Key’s inspired poem.

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Two hundred years, on September 14th, it was the unlikely convergence of a physician and a lawyer that produced the most recited poem in American history. Its inspiration occurred just a few miles from Fort McHenry, located in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the site of one of our nation’s most important military conflicts.

COVID-19: Maybe More Contagious — But Far Less Deadly

January 25, 2025May 7, 2020 by Tom McGinley

One of the earliest alerts that the COVID-19 virus was not the death sentence that most scientists in the mainstream made it out to be was by Stanford School of Medicine professor, Dr. John Ioannidis. He is ranked by Google Scholar as “one of the world’s 100 most-cited scientists” and is the publisher of more than a thousand studies.

Dr. Ioannidis looked at one of the first places of known infection, the Diamond Princess cruise ship, that was quarantined by Japanese officials on February 4. 700 passengers and crew were infected and 9 died.

By examining the demographic make-up of those infected on-board, Dr. Ioannidis concluded that the fatality rate in the U.S. would be nowhere near the early predictions of one to two million deaths. He thought at worst it would be comparable to annual influenza deaths.

Medicare for All – One of the worst ideas in the nation’s history

September 5, 2020November 16, 2018 by Tom McGinley

(FINAL of a seven-part series: Medicare for All – Quality and Accessible Care for None)

The core belief of the Medicare for All advocates is that only a government-run, bureaucratic “Deep State” can solve the problems with medical care in America.

These socialists (after all, they are advocating adoption of one of the most socialized systems in the world) can’t even fathom that it is the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy, and more recently the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, that have further damaged an already flawed medical payment system.

One only has to look at the Veterans Affairs (VA) system to get a glimpse of how national, government-run health care would (not) function. This authentic single-payer system has let our veterans down for years. A VA investigation in 2016 found that over 100 vets died just in Los Angeles County alone over a 9-month period while awaiting treatment. And this despite a $15 billion reform package that passed in 2014 supposedly to clean things up.

It is essential to recognized that even with all of our payment or insurance issues, actual medical care in America is second to none.

Health care options for America

September 5, 2020November 7, 2018 by Tom McGinley

(Sixth in a seven-part series: Medicare for All – Quality and Accessible Care for None)

Few Americans are satisfied with the current health care system. But actual medical care in America is not the problem, it’s second to none. What needs fixing is how we pay for it.

The health care payment system in the United States is clearly in need of major reform. Our challenge as a prosperous society is to compassionately provide necessary medical care to those who have difficulty affording it but also to ethically relieve those now burdened with the cost of care of others through considerably higher medical bills or insurance premiums.

One of out of every five Americans don’t pay anything for their care – but somebody does. Doctors and nurses don’t work for free. The people who pay for this care are the “neighbors” of those who got it free or subsidized. What makes this so unethical is that those “neighbors” who end up paying more than what they legitimately owe are mostly being charged extra without their knowledge.

When people don’t pay the cost of a service or product, they want all of it they can get. It’s not a criticism of them, it’s simply human nature. Demand skyrockets when something desirable is free. I’ve had ER physicians tell me they’ve often seen the same people, on Medicaid or without any insurance at all, show up in ER routinely for the most minor of injuries or ailments. Everyone should pay something even if its nominal. It would discourage frivolous use.

The better solution is to move toward a market-oriented system that still benevolently provides care for the truly needy but doesn’t allow others to abuse the system by showing up in ER every two weeks with the sniffles.

Medicare for All: Socialist destruction of American health care

September 5, 2020November 4, 2018 by Tom McGinley

(Fifth in a seven-part series: Medicare for All – Quality and Accessible Care for None)

If the Democrats win the House on Tuesday, the first bill they may pass is “Medicare for All” since it already has over 120 co-sponsors. These now admitted socialists would destroy the world’s greatest health care system due to their arrogance and addiction to political power.

Nearly all previous socialist efforts to destroy the free market have started with the same premise: The current system is so bad, so troubling that government must step in to take remedial action by imposing itself into the marketplace. Phrases like “single-payer,” “universal health care” or the current favorite, “Medicare for All,” are attractive marketing phrases designed to promote expanded government power. In reality, “restricted health care,” “shared shortages,” or “inaccessible care” would be more accurate when describing such concepts.

To socialists, the free market can’t be trusted because it’s just not fair the way it uses merit to produce winners and losers. It’s why government and academia are so closely ideologically aligned. Many have never worked one day of their lives dealing with free market competition. They just know they’re smarter and have better ideas better than those less intelligent simpletons who are out there actually doing the work.

“Medicare for All” would destroy America’s great hospitals

September 5, 2020October 31, 2018 by Tom McGinley

(Fourth in a seven-part series: Medicare for All – Quality and Accessible Care for None)

First of all, it must be stated: Everyone in the United States has access to quality medical care regardless of ability to pay in America’s great hospitals.

It is a misconception, and a common cry with the “Medicare for All” crowd that that because many in America don’t have health insurance, they aren’t able to receive medical care. As virtually any Emergency Room physician or nurse will convey, that isn’t true. In most cases, hospitals would treat these uninsured patients anyway, but they must do so because of federal law.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) was passed in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It states that all hospitals under the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) system, must examine and treat essentially anyone who walks into the waiting room.

As we as a nation seriously consider whether or not we want a socialized system for our medical care, many would be surprised to learn that our hospitals are not in very good financial shape. Yes, of course they see the expansions and exorbitant hospital bills and immediately assume our medical centers are overcharging for care and loaded with money. For some elite centers this may be true, but overall, hospitals are not in good financial condition and would be irreparably damaged by a single-payer, socialist, “Medicare for All” type system.

Health care in America: great medical care, poor payment system

January 25, 2025October 23, 2018 by Tom McGinley

(Third in a seven-part series: Medicare for All – Quality and Accessible Care for None)

Those touting the “Medicare for All” plan are using the phrase to entice those with just a surface awareness of what Medicare actually is into blindly jumping on board the bandwagon. In fact, the phrase is extremely disingenuous (albeit politically brilliant), designed to intentionally mislead the an public. (It is not so dissimilar from the deceptively named “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”)

The goal is to seduce a mostly uninformed citizenry into supporting a concept that sounds like they’ll (1) never again have to pay anything for medical care; (2) such care will always be readily available when they want it and (3) medical care in the United States will remain top notch.

What Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters say they really want is a Canadian-style, government-, state- or bureaucratically-run health care system and not a plan similar to Medicare here in the U.S.

Countries with socialized medical care and the misconception of “rights”

January 25, 2025October 16, 2018 by Tom McGinley

(Second in a seven-part series: Medicare for All – Quality and Accessible Care for None)

The core “moral” principle supporting the Medicare for All proposal is “health care is a right.” This is not so. Free health care is not a human right, no more than free food, clothing or shelter are human rights. An intrinsic right can only come from a transcendent being – God. Kings don’t have “divine rights,” they have “divinely gifted rights” – like all the rest of us do.

No human right can demand the involuntary servitude of another person – either by being forced to provide his or her medical expertise free of charge, or by having the state confiscate the private wealth of others to pay for the care of those who don’t pay. Intellectuals invoke the claim of “rights” even when they can cite no basis or reason. They just claim it, like saying everyone has the right to “affordable housing” or a “living wage.”

The two nations most prominently cited as the darling models of single-payer systems for the Medicare for All crowd are Canada and Great Britain.

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