RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senate Republicans must be making progress on their latest attempt to reform health care, because the opposition is again reaching jet-aircraft decibel levels of outrage. The debate could use a few facts—not least on the claims that the GOP is engaging in an unfair process.

Republicans are scrambling to pass Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy’s health-care bill before Sept. 30, when the clock expires on the budget procedure that allows the Senate to pass legislation with 51 votes. The bill would devolve ObamaCare funding to the states, which could seek waivers from the feds to experiment within certain regulatory boundaries, and it also repeals the individual and employer mandates and medical-device tax.

The left spent weeks declaring this dead on arrival, but now that Republicans appear close to a majority here come the tweets. The Graham-Cassidy proposal “eliminates protections for people who are or ever have been sick. GONE. Insurers back to denying coverage for the sick,” Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy claimed this week.

In fact, a state that receives a waiver from ObamaCare’s regulations must show plans that retain access to “adequate and affordable” coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. ObamaCare’s rules are not the only way to do this, despite the claims of Jimmy Kimmel. The Affordable Care Act’s price restrictions have in practice degraded the quality of care for the ill and sent insurers shopping for healthy patients who are more profitable. (See “Pre-Existing Confusion,” May 2)

States could set up high-risk pools, for example. These pools subsidize care for those who need costly treatment without concealing the expense across healthy patients, who may drop coverage if they can’t afford it. This can lower premiums for everyone.

Another complaint is that Republicans may vote without a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which has said it will release a preliminary estimate but won’t rule on premiums or coverage effects for several weeks.

CBO forecasts are often wrong, but in this case they’d also be meaningless. The point of Graham-Cassidy is to allow states to experiment and tailor approaches to local populations. Some might try to expand Medicaid’s reach or even go single-payer. Others might tinker with reinsurance. The budget office can’t possibly know what 50 states would do or how that would affect coverage.

The irony is that even as critics say little is known about the bill, progressive groups are pumping out black box estimates of what would happen. A report flying around the internet from the consulting firm Avalere says that states will lose $4 trillion in funding over 20 years.

That sounds bad. Except the study assumes no state block grants past 2026—because Congress would have to reauthorize funding. That’s right: The report equates renewing an appropriation with zeroing out an account, as if Congress doesn’t periodically approve funding for everything from children’s health care to highway spending.

If I had to pick a title, I might call President Trump’s 2017 UN address, “Something for Everyone.”

For example, Trump supporters heard the words “America first” and “sovereignty” and glowed. Trump haters heard the word “sovereignty” and “American interests above all else” and ignited. So consumed were many by their own respective basking and bonfires, they failed to realize that no matter how many times Trump dropped the word “sovereignty,” it was sometimes in sentences like this: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.” In other words, we must reject threats to the new world order and back again.

I’n guessing that’s why neocons were carving the speech up into way many too portions of red meat (carpaccio?) for comfort. Loving it were Elliott Abrams at National Review, Sohrab Ahmari (“Trump’s Turtle Bay Triumph”), and that third amigo, Lindsay Graham, the kind of people once pertrified by The Great Candidate Trump America First Foreign Policy Speech of 2016. With all of that, there was plenty of smoke coming out of many ears — the New York Times, Stalin supporter Max Boot, to name a couple — which was also entertaining.

Then there were the big lines — including the big and also red line about “obliterating” the regime of North Korea if “Rocket Man” doesn’t stop launching missiles at us or our allies. Such talk thrills the Deplorables at home, but it troubles me because it tells me the generals are telling Trump what a quickee little war it will be against “Rocket Man” — just forget all about China, Russia, whether this might be a trap door into a larger regional war, and all that other strategy stuff. Here, they seem to be displaying their customary lack of forsight, and also negligence, when it comes to a fair appraisal of what US capabilities are like after 16 years of taxing stress on our military resources, which, by the way, they never seem to want to stop.

For some out of the box thinking on the subject — and just the pleasure of seeing a real strategic mind at work — read Admiral James A Lyons’ thoughts on using food as a point of pressure against the regime, food that is currently being provided by the UN to North Korea, where the regime exploits it.

Admiral Lyons writes: “Using `food’ as a weapon to force regime change is not what civilized nations normally do, but North Korea is not a normal nation. It is rogue nation that not only subjects its people to unimaginable humanitarian crises, but is also is ruled by a destabilizing regime that has threatened to cause the deaths of millions of Americans. Therefore, extreme measures are required prior to taking military actions” (emphasis added).

Back to Trump at the UN. My own eyes certainly lit up when the president explained the problem with Venezuela was not that it had implemented socialism poorly, but that Venezuela had implemented socialism faithfully. A marvelous line. More enjoyable still were the gasps, hiccupped laughs and guffaws the line elicited from all of the assembled socialists. In those moments of global upset I realized I could not think of a single UN “member-state” that was not in some large and fundamental ways itself socialist, and that, tragically, includes the USA.

And here we get to the defective foundation of not only the President’s disappointing appeal to “reform” this insidious World Body, but also of the widest possible academic and political consensus on past events, which, naturally, informs current events. That defective foundation is over three-quarters of a century at least of “court history,” not facts, not conclusions, about the subversion of the nations of the world by agents and supporters of world communism, for most of a century directed and supported by Moscow using extensive domestic networks in many countries. The United Nations is and always has been a massive New York outpost of this same global movement, at its core in direct conflict with our democratic republic and constitutional form of government.

The (unasked) question is, how could the UN possibly be anything else? It was created under the aegis of Soviet agent Alger Hiss, whose cover as a senior State Department official was first revealed publicly by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.

When Donald Trump ran for president, he criticized the interventionist policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, sparking fears that he would usher in a new era of American isolationism. But at the U.N. this week, Trump laid out a clear conservative vision for vigorous American global leadership based on the principle of state sovereignty.

Judging from their hysterical reaction, critics on the left now seem to fear he’s the second coming of George W. Bush. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called his address “bombastic.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said it represented an “abdication of values.” And Hillary Clinton said it was “very dark” and “dangerous.” This is all the standard liberal critique of conservative internationalism. The left said much the same about President Ronald Reagan.

In New York, Trump called on responsible nation-states to join the United States in taking on what he called the “scourge” of “a small group of rogue regimes that . . . respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.” This mission can be accomplished, Trump said, only if we recognize that “the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.”

He is right. Communism and fascism were not defeated by the United Nations, and global institutions did not fuel the dramatic expansion of human freedom and prosperity in the past quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What has inspired and enabled the spread of peace, democracy and individual liberty was the principled projection of power by the world’s democratic countries, led by the United States.

This is what is needed today — and what Trump promised in his address. He recast his “America First” foreign policy as a call not for isolationism but for global leadership by responsible nation-states. He embraced the Marshall Plan — the massive U.S. effort to support Europe’s postwar recovery. And he declared that “if the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph” because “when decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.”

Trump then used this theme of sovereignty to challenge the United States’ two greatest geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, insisting that “we must reject threats to sovereignty from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.”

The president also had a blunt message for North Korea. He dismissed its leader, Kim Jong Un, as “Rocket Man” and said Kim “is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” He made clear that “the United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” This message rattled some, and that was its intent. During the Cold War, Soviet leaders truly believed that Reagan was preparing for war and might actually launch a first strike. This belief is one of the reasons that a cataclysmic war never took place.

If we hope to avoid war with North Korea today, the regime in Pyongyang must be made to believe and understand that Trump is in fact, as he said at the U.N., “ready, willing and able” to take military action. His tough rhetoric was aimed not just at Pyongyang but also at China and other states whose cooperation in squeezing the regime is necessary for a peaceful solution. Those words must be followed by concrete steps short of total destruction to make clear that he is indeed serious and that North Korea will not be permitted to threaten American cites with nuclear annihilation.