As Mark Steyn writes in his weekly syndicated column, Obamacare is well worth the price to Democrats:
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.
AdvertisementRepublicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:
“Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
All of which comes back to Michelle Malkin’s question of the hour.
The only hole in this…and it is a big one is that the program does not enact until 2014…so it would not be entrenched in 2012 as nobody would be benefiting from it. It could be repealed in 2013 by a Republican president.
Well see Michael, that just brings the lie of this whole thing into clear relief now doesn’t it? I mean if health insurance reform is so damn necessary right-friggin-now, then why is it we can manage to wait for another 5 years to actually get, you know that “reform” they keep talking about being so necessary right now?
But there is something else that I’ve never understood about this whole approach. Its the strategy of it all.
The leftist base ideology hates insurance, especially health insurance. As a result, they spin up public hatred of the “evil big insurance companies” and propose replacing it with big safe warm and cuddly democratic governance.
Nice. A class hatred wound with a big Statist scab over it. I get that part.
What I don’t get is that insurance, hate it or not, actually works. Insurance mitigates risk. Over the past 2000 years of civilization, its been a proven method of helping the whole of civilization get over risk.
Me and old “James Burke of the BBC show connections”, we actually think insurance is one of the pillars of western civilization. Getting rid of insurance is as silly as wanting to get rid of money. Sure, the sentiment of doing so might feel good, but once you start working out the logistics of actually doing it, you quickly find out that money, for all its flaws, works out pretty well.
The problem I have with the left isnt that they want to get rid of insurance, as I said, its a nice sentiment, but what they are proposing replacing the “hated insurance companies” with doesn’t work to actually mitigate and manage risk, which should be the whole point, right?
It Never has worked and it Never will.
So in its bare essence what the left is now actually proposing that we trade for everyones “hatred of insurance companies” with is:
“the hatred of big government”.
Now, what strategic long term thinking genius puts himself in that predicament on purpose?
Who do they think the “pitchforked populace” is going to come after when this whole thing falls apart? Who do they think is going to be blamed for rise in deaths and lowering of living standards as a result of this bit of inane thinking?
Yes, I get it. people with zero coverage will come out better than the are now.
Good for them.
But the other 300 million that are ok right now, they will pay more and get less than they do today. Who do the Dems think are going to blame for that?
Now, if the Dems had managed to do this with the Republicans ( any Republicans, of any stripe) on board that would be one thing.
When this does all fall apart, they could argue that “Were all in this together” and “we must all come together to bear this burden” but thats not what they are getting for this. They are holding the whole bag of crap all by themselves.
There is just no national consensus on this issue. If there is any consensus, its on that this whole thing stinks to high heaven.
The Left hates insurance exactly because it provides a way to deal with the calamities of life through a private arrangement.
That is the Government’s claim to fame, and insurance is a direct competitor.
The current plan is to rely on the insurance companies while regulating them to death. As they die, the story will be that this is another market failure, that those companies couldn’t continue after the excess profits had been removed from them.
Then, government stands alone to save the society.
I fail to see how converting the citizenry into liabilities for the state to manage will end up helping the citizenry. Once you become a liability to the state, the state will naturally take action to limit that liability. As it stands today, the citizenry is a net asset to the state, but if the state becomes the primary resource for mitigation of risk for health, then the state will do what it has to minimize that risk using any form it sees justified in enacting.
We talk today of how awful it is that insurance companies might use DNA testing to issue or deny policies, but when the state has this responsibility, they will be compelled to use it and you will have no standing to deny the state access to that information. Your DNA says alot about you and about your family history, and what it says today is nobody’s business but your own. If the state is responsible for health care, it will the states business. You will not be allowed to deny the state access to this information.
Just imagine the implications to personal privacy of the state using DNA. This will of course be done “for the greater good” and in the name of the public interest, your rights to privacy what little there were, will mean a hill of beans if the state is responsible for building and using a data base of DNA to help “cut costs and expenses”.
I would think our own sordid history with the formation and practice of eugenics in the last century would warn off our people from the idea of the state running health care, but it seems that its due to make a comeback in a big way. I cant help but think that all those “progressives” of the last century who wanted to “make the world a better place” through eugenics programs now stand ready to get their wish.
You know, Hayek was right. The thing about these big government programs is they always start with the words “We want to help you with your problem” but in the end, you become the problem.
Just take a look at something simple like the TSA. This is a program that was supposed to help us fight terrorism by providing airports with a professional organization and management team at airport security. Nice idea, but now its morphed into a system that treats the citizenry as criminals.
What was once repulsive, We now accept as a normal course of action.
Here is why this is a bad deal for the Left: “White Socialism.”
Imagine Republicans running on the platform of denying Health Care in any form to Illegal Aliens and Welfare recipients, anyone who cannot prove citizenship (this is basically White Middle Class men and women) … in order to fund fully, breast cancer screening every six months, and full treatment, for women starting at age 15 or so.
It’s hugely expensive. And its paid for by excluding … about 30 million people or so, maybe more if we have an influx of lots of illegals.
Now, how many think about 75% of White women would vote enthusiastically for that, at least?
The danger of socialism is not just that it doesn’t get rolled back, it is that it can morph from Bismarck’s bribe to the socialism of the White and National variety very, very quickly. This does not (and mostly isn’t) mean goose-stepping militarists. It is mostly cutting the pie so that the majority gets everything and the rest get nothing.
Socialist medicine means a battle over spending money on AIDS or Breast Cancer. Vaccines for Illegal Alien kids or Prostate cancer treatment.
No of course socialist medicine will NEVER be repealed. But it can be significantly changed to simply exclude the non-White, non-Middle Class. The BNP brilliantly argues they can restore NHS to it’s “glory” (non-existent of course) by expelling most Muslim immigrants. It is explicitly designed to crack the gender gap wide open.
Women are the fount and basis of PC, but will abandon it easily for the prospect of avoiding a death sentence from Breast Cancer or at best, masectomy.
Indeed I could see a Republican alliance of military spending (employment for White middle/working class men) and health care (White Middle class women) and screwing everyone else, explicitly. Socialism always comes down to cutting the pie so the winning coalition benefits, in a multi-racial society that will always come down on the splits of race.
America is not Russia, the winning hand is via splitting the health care pie by race. And once done, THAT brings into maintaining racial dominance in the population to keep the goodies flowing in a way that simply is not there in a private-sector expanding economy (that buys racial peace by economic expansion roughly benefiting most classes/races).