There is so much we want to say right now. HCR efforts have lurched forward in recent days and we are not happy. We wish we could do something to draw people’s attention to this mess– and in doing so we might be able to start again and actually address so many important issues that so many people are facing.

But, this is not going to happen. So, instead, we found solace in some books (paper versions of web pages, but longer). These books were about the debates raging between the Federalists and the Republicans in the years from about 1799 to 1809 or so. The primary focus of these debates were what the role of our nascent country was to be in the World. The practical, boots on the ground issues were simple to see and understand: our merchant vessels were being preyed upon by pirates, the British were impressing our sailors and routinely sailing deep within our inland waterways around Maryland and Virginia and we were trying to pay off a huge government debt of about 20 million dollars from the Revolution. One side wanted no taxes, no Navy and were arguing to just leave England alone and let her do what she will. The MAJOR issue came down to a Navy. We had none, and the Federalists wanted one. We had six frigates (The USS Constitution survives to this day in the Charlestown Navy Yards– the longest commissioned warship in the world– her keel was laid in 1799) and not much else (USS Constitution in 2007 below).

We won the small Barbary War under Jefferson and then we mothballed the whole fleet. The debates were fierce. For example, when the Federalists would cite statistics on the impressment issue, the Republicans countered with pointing out how we could do nothing about the issue even if we had 20 ships– the British had just won at Trafalgar and had over 400 warships and 110,000 men in service. When the Federalists would point out the vulnerability of our seaports to attack, the Republicans countered that an effective defense would be to abandon the cities and move everyone inland.

For the better part of 11 years this was debated and argued and each year decisions were made that in hindsight, were just foolish. It took start of the War of 1812, the taking of a British frigate by the USS Constitution and the burning of Washington DC to finally settle the issue.

The lesson? The founders understood that we would make mistakes– but so long as those mistakes were made in the forums provided by the Constitution, then nothing is permanent and wrongs can be righted. It was true for a standing Navy (13 years later), it was true for Prohibition (13 years later) and so it will likely be for Obama Care. Perspective matters at times– and this is how we are trying to find ours.

That being said– we want to do our best to sound the Federalist alarm. A great summary of what’s at stake appeared online at the Cato Institute this month.

We reprint it below– and beg of you to take note of its source and author.

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

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Much of the press coverage of the Democrats’ health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans’ lives for being too costly.

To call the dangers of this legislation “death panels” obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.

Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute’s health-care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), “111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar,” the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health-care expenditures.

Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.

In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients — without actually seeing them and their condition — will mean, as Tanner notes, that “every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: ‘Does the government think I’m doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?’” (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)

President Obama and his supporters in Congress insist that clinical studies prove how many needless and expensive tests and procedures are so often performed. But these are collective statistics. Individual patients are left out.

Harvard Medical School faculty members Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband bring the individual back into this crucial debate in “Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care” (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31): “Data from clinical studies provide averages from populations and may not apply to individual patients.

“Clinical studies routinely exclude patients with more than one medical condition and often the elderly or people on multiple medications. Conclusions about what works and what doesn’t work change much too quickly for policymakers to dictate clinical practice.” Everyone, regardless of political party, should keep in mind:

“If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions.”

If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care “reform” measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.

Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor and, of course, haven’t the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America?

Another doctor whose byline in the New York Post I try never to miss is Mark K. Siegel, a practicing internist and an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. In “Destroying the Doctor-Patient Bond” (New York Post, Aug. 3), he points to Section 123 of the House bill that “establishes a Health Benefits dvisory Committee, chaired by the surgeon general, which makes recommendations to the HHS secretary on what should be covered and what shouldn’t.

“These rulings from on high,” Dr. Siegel warns, “are problematic, since useful treatments or tests for one patient are not appropriate for another. Appeals are bound to be time consuming and largely ineffective. This is the government interfering directly with the practice of medicine.”

Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by “Change we can believe in”? Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?

Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast-cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings “based on costs and large group averages, not individuals” lead him to fear that “we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people’s lives for money.”

Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don’t act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.

I’m scared, and I do mean to scare you.

We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.