America’s belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one’s philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you’re a cabinet minister or a bigtime hockey player, you’ll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it’s up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs, and arbitrary shakedowns.Bottom line:
My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.Read the rest. It's all bad.
As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.
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Mark is dead right. Goodbye, USA 1.x; hello, USA 2.0.
ReplyDeleteEuropean Social Democracy was always our fatal attractor. Thankfully, tho, we were always 5-10 years behind. Boy, we've sure caught up to the EU this year.
With the (in hindsight, inevitable) capitulation of Vaclav Klaus to the Lisbon treaty, goodbye, European democracy. For all intents and purposes, Europe is the realization of the Progressive dream: A state runs by technocrats, with all other power centers marginalized.
I have enough faith in America to believe that we won't capitulate until the 2020's. Until then, we'll still enjoy some of the trappings of democracy and individual liberties, even though most of these imaginings will be mirages.
I never would have though the Declaration of Independence could be transcended and made meaningless. I'll continue to deeply mourn the passing of the USA.
Mark is dead right. Goodbye, USA 1.x; hello, USA 2.0.