The American Health Care industry is second to none in the world. Seriously ill patients come to the United States for treatment because our commitment to innovation is unmatched, and our research is the envy of the world.

Americans have long believed that one's health is a private matter that should not become the business of government. Therefore, using this reasoning, as far back as 1854 when President Franklin Pierce vetoed a national mental health bill on the basis that it would be unconstitutional to regard health as anything but a private matter in which government should not become, any National Health Care system has been frowned upon.

A member of the Democrat Party, and a major supporter of the socialist agenda, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, favored a national health insurance program and wanted to make it a part of the Social Security Act. He later decided not to follow through with that plan when he realized that opposition to it would likely jeopardize passage of the entire act.

Universal Health Care goes by many names. It is sometimes called Nationalized Health care, Socialized Medicine, and Single Payer Insurance, but in the end, it is still the same - government paid health care, paid for by the dollars of the American taxpayer.

Health Insurance is something that in the early history of this nation was either non-existent, or something the elite could afford. As a result, doctors were subject to the free market, and kept prices affordable and quality high because of the necessity to do so in order to hang on to their customers. Competition was fierce in the industry, and doctors even practiced house calls in order to keep the patients happy.

During the many attempts by the government to make nationalized health care a reality, insurance companies became more willing to reach out to more customers in an affordable manner so that the government wouldn't take their business away from them with a single government paid system. As a result, FDR and Truman were unable to create a national health care system as desired. Truman, in fact, being more conservative than Roosevelt, dropped the pursuit of such a program quickly after becoming president.

As time passed the legal industry became involved, and as lawsuits against the industry rose, so did insurance costs in order to combat the onslaught of litigation they found themselves defending themselves against. And as this happened, insurance companies invested in other markets to deepen their pockets. The medical industry began to charge more in response to the Insurance Company's deep pockets, and began to recommend even unnecessary procedures in a combination of attempting to earn more money, and to cover all of their bases so that legal attacks would be less likely to come to them. Eventually, the cost of medical care became so great that the individual could no longer afford medical care without insurance companies being involved to pay the bills, and this shifted the control of the medical care industry from the consumer/care provider to the lawyers and insurance companies. Long gone were the doctor-patient relationships that kept down prices.

Nonetheless, though American health care can be confusing, impersonal, and more expensive than it needs be, the quality of the American Health care Industry is the best in the world.

It is the cost of health care that has the American public in a quandary, and willing to try just about anything to resolve the nightmare. Apparently, the lawyers, greedy doctors, and out of control insurance industry is the problem. Few deny that. The question is, how do we bring down the costs and make American Medical Care more affordable to the consumer once again?

As expected in a free market economy, it is private enterprise that is making headway in this issue. Entrepreneurs are finding ways to bring innovative, consumer-oriented health care to the market. These entrepreneurs are simplifying medical decisions, and reinvigorating primary care while lowering health-care costs. This health care revolution from the private sector is improving quality, lowering costs, and empowering the people to control their own health care. And the best way for this to move forward, and become successful, is for the government to move out of the way, and make it easier for private enterprise to do what they have always done for this country - provide an answer.

As we learned with the insurance industry, the "payer" becomes the controlling factor, and dictates to the industry what it can and can't do by its decisions on what it will and will not cover. Understanding that part of the equation, why would anyone want the government to have that kind of control over our private matter of health?

The examples liberals have used with me to proclaim the potential success of such a government run system is Medicare (Ken) and the Veteran's Administration medical system (Tom).

Thing is, when compared to private health care, these are both failed systems.

Medicare has become a system that is a failure in all senses of the word. It has become a "complex system of administered pricing and price controls, governed by elaborate statutory formulas and characterized by mind-numbing regulatory micromanagement. In sharp contrast to reimbursement for professional services in other economic sectors, Medicare providers are not paid according to their skill levels, their innovative treatments, the quality of the care delivered to individual Medicare patients, or the specific benefits provided to patients. Moreover, under current government formulas, they can look forward to future reductions in Medicare reimbursement even though they are expected to treat a dramatically larger Medicare population."

The system is going bankrupt before the government's eyes, and so they try to feed more taxpayer money into it to save the beast. Members of Congress have become unhappy with the Medicare physician payment program that they created for good reason.

The VA system for veterans is also heralded by members of the left as a rousing success, and a great example of government paid/controlled health care at its best.

I am a patient in the VA medical system. And I will have to agree that it is heads and tails better now than it was when you compare it to the system in the nineties. I joined VA as a partially-disabled veteran in 1988, and I have seen the best and the worst that the VA system has to offer.

As a veteran I am appreciative of the system. And I don't see it as an entitlement or free system, because VA care has been bought and paid for by the blood of our veterans, and they deserve a system to help them in their post-military years. However, when compared to the private health care system, VA is not exactly the bed of roses the liberal left loonies make it out to be.

To illustrate a couple failings of the VA system, I will use myself as an example.

If I wish to see my doctor at the VA, it usually takes six months. If I push it, I may get in to see him in a few weeks. Immediate care requires a "triage" visit through the emergency room with a doctor not familiar with my case, and all to often once he or she has my record, they do not understand the case. In fact, in two instances the duty doctor prescribed wrong medications that wound up putting me in a crisis situation. With my private doctor in the civilian world, usually I see my doctor the same day. At worse, I see his assistant, or get my doctor the next day.

When a recent ailment arose a few years ago, one that causes me severe pain in certain joint areas of my body, using an internal network of specialists and doctors, VA gave me a diagnosis of what I am experiencing in about six months. I went to my private doctor at the same time, and they had an accurate diagnosis in a couple weeks.

When I go to VA it is usually an all day affair, 5 to 8 hours depending on the tests that need to be run, and the fluids that need to be drawn. At my private physician's office I am in and out of there more often than not in less than two hours, adding another half hour at the place across the street should I need other tests performed, and blood drawn.

Here's my point: Is VA and Medicare a God-send for some folks? Sure it is. And for welfare style health care programs, like what the county hospitals use, use of it by citizens on a temporary basis seems to help in cases of extreme hardship, or bad timing (like if a person becomes injured between jobs and has no insurance at that moment). But considering the government's track record, and the private nature of one's health, do we really desire the government to be the payer (and therefore the controller) of all of our health care in the U.S.? Do we really wish to see our country pursue a system that is a proven failure in Canada and Britain? Do we really wish to see the same entity that runs our Departments of Motor Vehicles with such efficiency (Sarcasm, of course) to run our health care system into the ground while with the private enterprise influence it reigns as currently the best in the world?

I think not.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with a boat-load of foolish borrowers, failed to heed the warnings that the huge housing bubble Americans were experiencing through the nineties and early millennium would come to an end. The borrowers, fueled by the greedy hopes of selling their houses for a profit in a couple years, bought homes they could not afford with loans that were destined to increase in cost should they not unload the home in time. The banks failed to raise enough cash to reassure the investment community they would be able to survive a severe downturn in United States home prices.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, in order to encourage more buying, and in an attempt to push their profit margin to the limits, relaxed their standards in order to buy more loans. Wall Street banks also lowered their standards in the hopes of cashing in as well. Greed and arrogance carried the wave for a short time, but like with anything, what goes up must go down.

A glimmer of hope popped its head up last Spring when builders began building the final build-outs of projects, and a number of them sold rapidly. Industry experts hoped that the industry would see these few sales as a move back in the right direction, and held their breath for a moment to see if a new bubble would begin to expand. However, cautious in this new housing environment, the builders remained happy to only work on the final houses of their last projects so that they could simply close their books on the projects by the year's end. No new projects emerged, as some had hoped, and the bubble deflated before it had a chance to grow.

Now, the banking industry is in a crisis. As usual, there are those faint little calls by some Americans screaming, "The government has to do something about it!" And so, as some would expect from a President with Globalist leanings, and a Congress with the hopes of America becoming a Socialist Nation, the government has announced that it will take over the two mortgage giants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

It is being called a monumental move designed to protect the mortgage market from the failure of the two companies. The intervention will cost taxpayers billions, and the news of this governmental takeover of the banks follows news that more than 4 million American homeowners with a mortgage, a record 9 percent, were either behind in their payments, or in the process of foreclosure.

The two mortgage giants lost $3.1 billion from April to June, half of that coming from risky loans with ballooning monthly rises. While the companies claim to have enough resources to withstand the losses, the belief is that at the current rate of loss their financial cushions are not enough, and the companies will eventually find themselves in a position of not being able to fund their operations.

The result of this "rescue package" is the exposure of taxpayers to billions of dollars of potential losses, a wipe-out of common stockholders, and it could end up being costly to scores of investment, banking, and insurance companies.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 in an attempt to increase home ownership across the United States, and to enable Congressional Oversight into the industry. The sale of the idea to the American Public was that everyone had a "right" to home ownership, and the government was going to make sure it happened.

Thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Socialist Programs of the New Deal, the notion that it was an American's "right" to own a home by means of government subsidies was so firmly entrenched in the American mindset, Fannie Mae not only grew, but in 1968, as a part of Lyndon Johnson's societal engineering agenda, Fannie was converted into a private corporation and the ability to guarantee government-issued mortgages was switched from Fannie Mae to the federal government's newest creation, Ginnie Mae (Government National Mortgage Association). This meant that Fannie would begin to operate with private capital on a self-sustaining basis.

In 1970, Fannie Mae was authorized to buy conventional mortgages, and by the 1980s it began to purchase second mortgages and adjustable-rate mortgages. In the 80's it also commenced its mortgage-backed securities scheme.

Between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (another GSE), the largest source of cash for home buying in the United States was in existence, and they accounted for almost 50% of all mortgage bonds sold through April of 2007. Since the beginning of 2006, however, over fifty mortgage companies discontinued operations, claimed bankruptcy, or sought a buyer. Fannie Mae, however, continued to flourish until recent months. Since the end of March 2007, Fannie Mae's stock price increased by almost 20% whereas the S&P 500 Index had risen only 8.1% by July of that year.

Fannie Mae was a New Deal innovation, created by and for the federal government. This gives it different abilities and freedoms than your usual corporations, which are generally chartered by the states. The sole purpose of this federally chartered, quasi-private entity was to directly intervene in the housing market while avoiding a more conspicuous regulatory apparatus governed by rules. This allowed the government to advance and steer the government's progressive entitlement programs put in place by the New Deal without anyone ever really taking notice. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae expanded into mortgage insurance, sub-prime mortgages, and non-mortgage investments, exposing taxpayers to a massive risk of default or bankruptcy.

The Founding Fathers wrote the U.S. Constitution to limit the powers of the Federal Government, and they were specifically suspicious of judges and banks. The first step toward the centralization of banking through the Federal Reserve Act which was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat. The New Deal Programs by FDR, and the expansion of entitlement programs by Lyndon B. Johnson, were strictly against what the Founding Fathers intended, and these Democratic Party programs are now falling apart because of their unconstitutional characteristics.

As the government now takes another step towards centralizing control over banks, and further expanding entitlement programs, the consequences for poor decisions by individuals are not being paid. Now, with this program to bailout mortgages and save the banks, the taxpayers that were not driven by greed and arrogance are being punished.

Government manipulation is the cause of the problems we see rising in the economy and banking system. And government manipulation, and control, is going to exacerbate the problem. As painful as it may seem, to straighten out this mess the banks need to collapse, the home owners who are currently in foreclosure need to lose their homes and move into more affordable accomodations like apartments, and we need to all buckle down, and get through this together, without government intervention.

If we don't bear the burdens of our mistakes as individuals, before the next dozen years are finished, we will be steamrolling in the direction of socialism, the "privilege" of home ownership will be gone, and it will take a revolution to turn us around to head back in the direction of liberty, and the American Way.

The definition of patriotism, it seems, varies from person to person, and from party to party. The official meaning you see in the dictionaries of the world is, "Love and devotion for one's country."

I have an American friend who I know from the Oregon Coast named Dan Bessie, who now lives in France. He is so liberal that he doesn't like Obama much because the Democratic Party Nominee is too conservative for him. This fellow writer, and owner of a small publishing company, is the son of one of the ten blacklisted members of Hollywood in the 50's. He sent me an e-mail today that read:

Palin's Popularity - A Wake Up Call: How accurate this poll is, I have no idea, but since, if it's even close to being reliable, it demonstrates the inability of too many voters to examine the lack of substance behind the glitz, it needs to be taken seriously, and the need for those of us who recognize the dangerous nature of the McCain-Palin candidacy to redouble our efforts to defeat them.

The link to the article he gave me was to an article at Rasmussen Reports titled, Palin Power: Fresh Face Now More Popular Than Obama, McCain.

Another liberal e-mailer friend of mine sent me a picture of Sarah Palin in a Bikini toting a rifle saying, "Is this really the piece of white trash you want to have as Vice President?" The photo, as expected, turned out to be a fake.

Yet another liberal, this one being a blogger that actually commented on Political Pistachio about this, has proclaimed that Sarah Palin is a secessionist and was once a member of the AIP (Alaskan Independence Party). This same individual, Thomas, also then accused me of chasing rumor and conjecture when I posted about Obama's fake birth certificate even though three forensic investigators deemed it a forgery and it wasn't until later that a legitimate Certificate of Live Birth surfaced. Of course, Tom was the one falling for rumor and hearsay with his "Palin was a member of the AIP" claim. Todd and Sarah Palin have never been a part of the AIP, and the information circulating around the internet on that is absolutely false. It is simply another liberal blogging community smear.

Troopergate is another one floating around. Thing is, the more you get to know about this one, the more it makes Sarah Palin actually look good. Adam Brickley of Palin for VP discusses it a little bit on my Political Pistachio Radio Show a week ago, as well. By the way, Adam has been on a number of cable shows and channels including Fox News, and his most recent guest spot was on The Colbert Report.

In fact there are a number of lies and smears floating around out there about Sarah Palin, and of course so far they have all been lies and baseless attacks.

This, my friends, is the way of the liberal left. Unable to argue the issues, they resort to these kinds of attacks often. Then, when a non-liberal even sounds like they may be questioning a liberal's patriotism, they flip out proclaiming the person to be judgmental and a hater.

Okay, let's give those liberal liars a benefit of the doubt, then. Perhaps if a presidential candidate like Barack Obama would prefer to hold his hands over his genitals than over his heart, while refusing to look at the American flag, maybe, just maybe, that means he is patriotic in his own way. And perhaps his refusal to wear an American Flag lapel pin like the rest of the candidates and political figures while on television was not an avoidance of patriotism - perhaps he didn't like the little hole the pin left on his jacket.

Heck, Democrats over all are very patriotic, right? In fact, they are so patriotic, they throw the American Flag, after the Democratic Convention ended, in the garbage!

No, of course not, I won't be judgmental and question the liberal left's patriotism as they call anything written about Obama that doesn't paint him as a messianic figure a smear as they spread all kinds of lies and rumors about Sarah Palin. But I will observe, and offer those observations to others to make their own determinations.

In my, opinion, however, refusing to hold your hand over your heart, avoiding displaying the Stars and Stripes on your person when in a political arena and it is expected that you do so, and tossing our nation's flag in the trash with all of the other rubbage, is hardly a show of love and devotion for the United States of America.

Just an observation.