Ted Kennedy is Patient Zero

Ted Kennedy is Patient Zero
Roger Hedgecock
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Posted: July 27, 2009
1:00 am Eastern

© 2009

It started with Ted; the "reforms" to flood the U.S. with legal and illegal immigrants from everywhere, and to put the government in charge of your health care started with Ted, back in the 1960s.

Patient Zero: The 1906-07 typhoid epidemic in the U.S. was traced back to a single infected individual – "Typhoid Mary" Mallon. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in the U.S. has been traced back to a single infected flight attendant – Gaeton Dugas.

The virus of revolutionary "reforms" in immigration law beginning in 1965 which have transformed immigration from a positive infusion of aspiring Americans "yearning to breathe free" to a tsunami of multi-cultural humanity yearning to live free at our expense can be traced to a political Patient Zero – one senator – Ted Kennedy.

The virus of government-run health care destroying the doctor-patient relationship, driving up costs, rationing care and invading privacy began with Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Ted is by far the most consequential Kennedy.

To understand how this happened, you have to go back to the 1960s.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962, Kennedy is the second most senior member of the Senate (behind Byrd) and the third longest serving member of the Senate ever.

In 1965, Kennedy authored the Immigration and Nationality Act. The act abolished the national origins quota system and provided for "family re-unification" and unlimited "refugee" admissions.

Kennedy sold the act as a "merit system" that would not result in an influx of poorer, less-educated people from Africa and Asia, would not affect American jobs and would not result in immigrants becoming a "public charge."

Just the opposite happened. Millions of extended "family members" have joined their U.S. citizen relatives – and the welfare and Social Security rolls. Millions more "refugees" (the most recent fearing persecution because they're "gay") have popped up in every hamlet in the country. And many millions of people from every corner of the earth now populate every corner of the U.S., demanding schooling in their native language and resisting any notion of assimilation as Americans.

Kennedy supported the 1986 Immigration Act, which responded to the phenomenon of illegal immigration by promising to secure the border with Mexico, sanction employers of illegal aliens and grant amnesty to workers already here.

The border remains open to this day. Very few employers are sanctioned for hiring illegals and driving down American wages, but the amnesty went into effect immediately.

The result? A problem of 2.5 million illegals in 1986, within 20 years, became a problem of 12-20 million illegals. In May 2007, the Federation of American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, and I coordinated a grassroots campaign that defeated the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill.

They are not just workers "doing jobs Americans won't do." Illegals today commit crimes Americans won't do, and in numbers that America has never seen before.

A teenage girl in a remote village in Maine dies of an overdose of heroin provided by a Mexican gangster. The FBI estimates that the El Salvador based MS-13 gang has now reached 100,000 members in the U.S. Phoenix has become the No. 2 kidnapping center in the Americas (just behind Mexico City) as the cartels fight each other for drug routes and market share.

Thursday, Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas was shot and killed by border smugglers in rugged country east of San Diego. Law enforcement started a manhunt, announcing that at least one of Rosas' assailants was wounded. Police found a suspect in a hospital in San Jose, Calif., (some 550 miles away) being treated at taxpayer expense.

Kennedy's answer to these problems his own legislation caused? You guessed it. Yet another "immigration reform" bill promising to secure the border, sanction employers of illegals and give amnesty to those here.

Working with FAIR, 43 talk show hosts and hundreds of their listeners will gather in Washington, D.C., from Sept. 13-17 to defeat this latest amnesty for illegals bill.

Then there's the Holy Grail: national health care.

Today's Obamacare "health insurance reform," like the Clinton health care "reform" of 1993, was driven by Kennedy's lifelong obsession to nationalize American health care.

A supporter of Medicare in 1965, Kennedy assured the nation that the taxpayer cost of care for our 3.9 million elderly would not exceed $4 billion a year. This year, 45 million beneficiaries cost almost $500 billion.

The "crisis" of cancer was the stated reason for Kennedy's National Cancer Act of 1971, which promised millions of dollars for cancer research and produced a gravy train of grants to favored institutions and very little progress in curing cancer.

As the author of the HMO Act of 1973, Kennedy spoke in 1978 to the Senate in support of amendments strengthening the HMO law. He praised HMOs for delivering high quality care at 20 to 25 percent less cost than "fee for service" providers.

By 2001, HMOs were not enough government regulation of medical care. In that year, Kennedy authored a "Patients' Bill of Rights" condemning HMOs as "second-rate care" and calling for an end to "abuses in managed care." Only full government control of medical care would do.

As an enthusiastic proponent of Obamacare, Kennedy joins all other members of Congress who will not leave their gold-plated Federal Employee Health Benefits plan to join the "reform" plan they believe the rest of us must have. Most ironic of all, prompt helivac and immediate access to the best surgeons in the U.S. saved Kennedy's life last year. Under Obamacare, none of the rest of us would get that treatment.

I've often heard the cynical saying that one person cannot make a difference. Ted Kennedy has, in a very negative way. He's Patient Zero, infecting the American body politic with the big government virus our founders feared and fought to defeat.

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