-By Warner Todd Huston
Every few weeks for months now leftist bloggers have been happily touting the “fact” that our second president, John Adams, passed the first “national healthcare law” one that supposedly forced Americans to buy a form of healthcare. Unfortunately for them, this is simply untrue and comparing John Adams’ sailor’s relief act to Obamacare is misleading at worst and an apples to oranges comparison at best.
But even as today’s leftists want to use this old sailor’s act as poof that nationalized healthcare has precedent, and even as they are wrong, the history does serve us well as an example of the follies of nationalized healthcare. Curiously enough, it’s a lesson that the leftists don’t seem to mention in their laudatory pieces on John Adams’ law.
The law in question is the “act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen,” passed in 1798.
This law mandated owners of sailing vessels to pay a per-sailor tax to the federal government so that members of the merchant marine could find temporary healthcare when they got sick. The act informed the nation that the president is “hereby authorized, out of the same, to provide for the temporary relief and maintenance of sick, or disabled seamen, in the hospitals or other proper institutions…”
Now, the modern American left points to this and, squealing with glee, claims that this was the first “healthcare mandate.” They imagine that this law was the first version of Obamacare and that this is somehow precedent for Obama’s modern, socialist power grab.
Unfortunately for our friends on the left, a closer look at this ancient law fails the test as support for Obamacare.
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No, John Adams Did Not Pass the First Obamacare Law”
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