Remember when the progressives used to complain that President Bush was "distracted" from Afghanistan by Iraq? If the U.S. is attacked by terrorists on Obama's watch, it may be written that Americans died because we had an insurance salesman when we needed a commander in chief.
JAMES TARANTO
We all know that a good healthcare system can be improved by increased competition, tort reform, tax credits for catastrophic insurance plans, deregulation, etc.
But Obamacare is not really about medicine. It is rather aimed at absorbing more of the private sector — once more, to create a vast new constituency of government workers and beneficiaries, to ensure an equality of result in treatment and access, and to replace private health insurers with public bureaucrats.
Do you want an autonomous family practitioner, entrepreneurial, keen to adapt to patient needs and tastes, juggling 10 employees and a 2-million-dollar family practice budget, grossing $400,000 a year in profits, highly opinionated and self-reliant, using his profits once in a while to ski or buy a BMW — or have him transmogrified into a GS-something, at $100,000 a year, with government benefits, unionized, docile, and waiting to go home when his shift at the dreary government clinic ends, wearing his doctor union T-shirt to work and eager to vote in politicians who ensure him lifetime tenure, generous retirement packages, and guaranteed pay raises?
I had wondered what was pushing healthcare “reform”, now I see it’s the prospect of more union dues.
In his speech to a joint session of Congress last night, the president offered what presumably was meant to sound like an innocuous, or at least reasonable, analogy:
Unless everybody does their part, many of the insurance reforms we seek--especially requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions--just can't be achieved. And that's why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance--just as most states require you to carry auto insurance.
First, in fact, no state requires individuals to carry auto insurance. The owner of a car, which may be either an individual or a corporate entity, is required to carry insurance as a condition for a government permit allowing the car to be driven on public roads. Individual drivers, of course, are also required to obtain a government license, which requires fulfilling other conditions.
Second, insurance rates are set based on risk. It would be great to purchase property insurance AFTER a hurricane damaged your home. Oh wait, Mississippi tried that after Katrina.
I enjoy reading Charles Krauthammer. I hope you will find this article to be worthy of your time.
If I recall correctly, you have to “register” to read articles from the Washington Post. I use Meltmail for such purposes. I also have my browser, Chrome, save the password.
Americans are now focused on the liberals attempting to capture control of healthcare. They have been after this for over a century. It is the most important domestic item of my lifetime and if they get control, it will probably limit my lifetime.
However, this is taking our collective eyes off the more important issue. Our freedom being threatened from outside our borders.
I want to share with you some thoughts that are decades, even centuries old. After reading them, I suggest you will think they could have been written this week.
"The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles." The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Alexis de Tocqueville on Islam:
"I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself."
And a newer one:
It’s about Islam and Allah, it’s NOT about Israel, oil, voting, cartoons, unemployment, American television, globalization, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the occupation of Iraq or any other material or psychological cause other than the one spiritual cause the enemy keeps telling us over and over guides and justifies his actions and has guided and justified the wars of Islam for fourteen centuries.
VDH 09/06
