ObamaCare, like acid on America's soul

America needs a shrink at Rick Moran's place got me going on ObamaCare. My thoughts:

“America still does have a soul”

The soul that is in our Constitution and our laws and culture has been eroded and has been under attack by 1960s leftists who disparage the pillars of American traditions, values and freedoms. The Obama agenda is rooted in the 1960s new left and is like acid poured on America’s soul.

“people with enough clout believe that being able to get decent care when you become sick or diseased is a right”

Such a belief (in the 'right' to healthcare) is an oxymoron. No economic good is a ‘right’. Such blather does injustice to the real issue and challenge, and is precisely why the blather polls better when its abstract than when its real and concrete. Economic goods have limits, and any government program that tries to ’solve’ the problem of market/cost-limited healthcare will replace it with bureaucratic limits (the road to ‘death panels’ and QALY ratings is paved with good intentions).

If society should provide healthcare to the level society can afford rather than an individual can afford, state it that way. Stating it as a ‘right’ is selling a promise that no Government program can possibly keep. For example, if healthcare is a ‘right’ than what right does the Government have dictating those terms of care - in qualified plans? What give Government the right to deny healthcare choices, including the choice NOT to take up health insurance? Why the heavy hand of Govt ready to fine and jail people for the ‘crime’ of not choosing what the Government dictates?

So in the end, they (the ObamaCare folks) are selling a lie. it has to be a lie, just based on iron laws of economics (it cant get fixed by renaming government-run healthcare into some euphemism, or hiding hundreds of billions of ‘doc fix’ costs in another bill). As people figure out that not only is it a lie - it has to be a lie - that support falls away.

After all, the old on Medicare are already on alert that they WILL will paying the price for ObamaCare through getting the screws applied. People have figured it out - Obama does not have a magic pixie dust solution to throw millions more into Government healthcare burden without it (a) costing a lot more (b) adding to the deficit (c) hurting those currently in Medicare etc. and (c) causing huge job-killing taxes, fees and regulation burdens on individuals and business. We know now that ALL of the above WILL happen.

But it’s worse than merely selling the lie and airbrushing limits. What’s worse than that even is that American rights and freedoms are being crushed left and right in this mad rush to turn more and more of the healthcare industry over to Government control. They are now asking Congress-critters “Say, is it Constitutional for the Federal Govt to force individuals to have health insurance?” Instead of the correct answer (”No, I guess not”) we now have videos of Congresscritters shrugging off Constitutionality … ah, and archiac scrap of paper barely of relevance to 21st century Governance.

That is the America-soul-killing thing.

As stated … “We are about to hand government an enormous amount of power along with the ability to control our lives in ways that can only dimly be glimpsed at this point.” … only glimpsed because this 2,000 page Godzilla of a bill is only the prelude to literally TENS OF THOUSANDS of pages of health care regulations that the DOZENS of bureaucracies will be writing up.

We will ‘accept’ it, the way we ‘accept’ gridlock rush hour traffic, the common cold, bad TV sitcoms, and the existence of endemic corruption in politics. “It’s just the way it is.” It will become an awful restriction on our freedom, an anchor on our economy, and a boon to much that is disreputable and base in politics (pandering, corruption, and self-interested taxpayer-raping-for-special-interests galore). But it will be like some ugly furniture that we cant seem to give away - and so it will stay.

… but it doesn’t HAVE to be that way. ObamaCare is NOT inevitable, even at this late hour. Only partisan blindness and this “idee fixe” of the Democrats that this is magic elixir for their majority (nope, its poison) keeps it going. Should the Dems pass it, Republicans will win back the House next year and the Senate and White House in 2012. And the Democrats will be discredited and tossed from power for another 10+ years. Perhaps they will realize that this Big Bad Bill is the wrong bill at the wrong time. Perhaps they will come back from the brink and do something appropriately incremental rather than a socialist rewrite of socialism… but who’m I kidding? Like the scorpion who stung the frog that carried him across the river and made them both drown - “It’s in their nature”.