The Senescent Man

There is a “news” piece from the Associated Press written by a reporter, Charles Babington, on the “double standard” of the GOP in the healthcare debate.  The essence of Babington’s so-called “news” piece is that Republicans hypocritically voted FOR a Medicare expansion that includes pharmaceutical drugs back in 2003 when they had control of the US Senate.  The claim is that the addition of drugs to the already existing federally funded health care entitlement added half a trillion in costs all by itself, and is actually “worse than” the current expansion in government run healthcare because the half trillion dollars was “deficit financed” which is purportedly unlike the current deficit financed bill because back in 2003 we had no way to finance the drug benefit expansion, and you see this new government entitlement is paid for (out of Medicare?!?!?)

Anyway, what royals me here is that first of all, this is NOT a news item.  It is pure, unadulterated, left of center biased opinion.

Secondly, there is an answer to this kind of sideswipe.

Mark Steyn says that, unlike the add on of drug benefits to an already existing entitlement, as bad as that may have been perhaps, what the Democrats have done is essentially turned over control of over one-sixth of the US economy to the government, and has placed government in between the patient and the doctor:

The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever.

Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” (i.e., the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade . . . ” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else…

…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.

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.

Labels: Age of Obama, health care reform

// posted by The Senescent Man @ 4:59 PM