Monthly Archives: June 2025

An Easier Solution

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The Progressive-Democrat Governor of Delaware, Matt Meyer, and his State Health Care Commissioner, Neil Hockstein, objected, in their Wednesday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, to the Senate’s intention to cut Medicaid funding for illegal aliens. Their objection centered on the relative cost of the State funding, through Medicaid, medical care for illegal aliens compared with illegal alien care in hospital emergency rooms, with the hospital footing the entire bill.

Consider that outpatient dialysis costs about $90,000 a year, while emergency inpatient dialysis can exceed $300,000 annually. That extra cost falls on hospitals, state budgets and, ultimately, the taxpayer.

The answer to that is not to foist the medical costs of illegal aliens, who have no business being here in the first place, off onto the good citizens of the State, or by Federal transfers onto the good citizens of our nation at large. The better solution is to go ahead and treat the illegal alien the one time in the hospital’s Emergency Room, and then shortly after stabilization, discharge, and departure from the hospital, round up the functionally self-identified illegal alien and deport him so he no longer is a drain on our medical services or costs.

Hard hearted? It might seem so, but it pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of an American citizen being denied an Emergency Room hospital bed because those beds are occupied by illegal aliens. It pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of spending the tax dollars us average Americans send to the Federal government on services for illegal aliens when those dollars are better spent on making health care—especially including expensive treatments like dialysis and especially especially including preventive health care programs for Americans on the bottom rungs of our economy—more broadly available and cost effective for us citizens.

Judicial Inconvenience

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A prison inmate went without his heart medication for a week, had a heart attack, and died. The 6th Circuit ruled no Qualified Immunity for the nurse who didn’t, per the Institute for Justice‘s 27 June newsletter, call his pharmacy to verify his prescriptions or take 10 minutes to get the necessary release form filled out for getting his prescription filled out.

The dissenting judge in the panel beefed (IJ paraphrase),

Now everyone in CA6 who dies in jail because they were briefly without their medication has a constitutional claim.

Sorry, Judge, the convenience of you or your court is no excuse for denying even a prisoner his due, and it’s no excuse for not holding materially accountable those prison officials who deny a prisoner his due.

The Circuit opinion and dissent can be read here.

Yeah, And?

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The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are moving to reduce the supplementary leverage ratio that big banks, and only those big banks, must maintain. The ratio is the amount of money those specifically-selected-by-government banks must maintain over and above their regular capital requirements against times of “market turmoil.” The reduction would make available much more money for those banks to lend into our economy.

Fed governor Michael Barr, once the Fed’s top bank regulator is opposed to the move. He’s cited by The Wall Street Journal as saying that the proposal would “significantly increase” the risk of a big bank failure.

To which I say, so what?

The failure of a “big” bank would be disruptive in the short term and potentially damaging to the particular bank’s creditors—depositors and others lending money to the bank—but in the intermediate- and long-term, such a failure would be net beneficial to our economy.

A big bank failure—without government bailout—would go a long way toward mitigating, even eliminating, the market distortions of an enterprise in our private economy—which is the economy outside of the government—being held as too big to fail and so guaranteed our taxpayers’ dollars being used to keep it alive, despite that lousy management having, over an extended period, brought the enterprise to that strait.

Reducing the supplementary leverage ratio also is a way of injecting more money into our economy without it being government tax money being injected. Our economy’s money supply would be increased, or not, based on sound business decision-making rather than on flawed political decision-making.

Fewer market distortions, less tolerance of bad performance in our market place, and reduced special treatments of particular businesses, would only make our market economy freer and more efficient and more prosperous for us all.

Misplaced Optimism

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The news writers over at The Wall Street Journal wrote this in all seriousness about the aftermath of the Israeli airstrikes on Iran; followed by the US’ MOP and cruise missile deliveries to Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; followed by a cease-fire between Iran and Israel:

The attack [by US B-2s and cruise missiles] made the US and the region safer, but did the diplomacy? The answer depends on how Mr Trump plays it from here.

No, it does not. The “answer” depends entirely on Iran’s Ayatollah and his mullah cronies in the Iranian government. Those persons still hate Israel and Jews in general, and they still hate the US. They still adhere to a prior Iranian President’s statement as those current Iranian government persons now resume their efforts to put together nuclear bombs with which to destroy Israel and pass on to later-reviving terrorist proxies for their use. Rafsanjani’s statement—brag, really, and threat—about which I’ve written before, l repeat here:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

On top of that, this war is not over because those Iranian government persons have not accepted defeat, and never will, much like Rome in an earlier period:

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the [Punic] war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

Iran, or at least the current crop of Iranian government persons, have not yet been annihilated. All that’s happened is that those persons have agreed to a cease-fire of uncertain durability and duration, during which they will rest their forces, refit them, rearm them, and then resume, possibly using alternative means, their murderous assaults on Israel, Europe, and the US.

It’s unfortunate that so many in the news writing business seriously think the Iranian government personnel think like Westerners do, have the same moral imperatives Westerners do, have the same value sets and respect for human life Westerners do.

These Iranian government persons are not interested in victory, per se. They’re interested in the destruction of Israel, and they do not care at all about the cost in lives to the Iranian people or to the lives of Muslims generally.

What Trump does, or does not do, diplomatically is wholly irrelevant.

Artificial Hysteria

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The Supreme Court earlier this week stayed a district court’s order blocking the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens to countries that are not the home countries of those illegal aliens. The activist Justices on the Court demurred. The Court’s stay does not address the underlying case; it merely allows the administration to proceed while that case makes its way through our court system. It’s the nature of their demurral that’s instructive here, though.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the dissenters,

Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled[.]

This over-the-top manufactured hysteria by the activist Justices does the Court no good at all. In an environment where many begin to question the legitimacy of the Court, Sotomayor’s excessive hype is the sort of thing fueling that question.