September 23, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

If your an advocate of compulsion, concentration of power and big government, you’ll love this analysis of the candidates’ health care plans by the NY Times.

I particularly enjoyed this (notice that the author states no democrat is proposing a single-payer system, yet then describes each of the plans as just that):

None of [the democrats] is proposing a “single payer” system run by the government. And all bend over backward to reassure people that they can maintain their current coverage if they like it. Their political goal is to head off opposition from those who fear that their own coverage might suffer in the course of covering some 47 million uninsured people.

The Democratic plans have far more similarities than differences. All three would move toward universal coverage and would rely heavily on mandates to do so. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards would require everyone to take out health insurance. That would bring young and healthy people into the system to help subsidize coverage for the more sickly, and would eliminate the problem of “free riders,” who show up uninsured at the emergency room and get very expensive care without paying. Mr. Obama would require parents to get insurance for their children but has no mandate for adults.

…

The Clinton plan would cost an estimated $110 billion a year, the Edwards plan $90 billion to $120 billion, the Obama plan $50 billion to $65 billion. All three would finance their programs partly by rolling back Bush-era tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year and partly with debatable savings they would get through cost-cutting.

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September 23, 2007 by Tom Armstrong.

Mark Steyn writes an excellent piece on nationalized health care and the uninsured. He begins:

Our theme for today comes from George W Bush: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.”
When the president uses the phrase, he’s invariably applying it to various benighted parts of the Muslim world. There would seem to be quite a bit of evidence to suggest that freedom is not the principal desire of every human heart in, say, Gaza or Waziristan. But why start there? If you look in, say, Brussels or London or New Orleans, do you come away with the overwhelming impression that “freedom is the desire of every human heart”? A year ago, I wrote that “the story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.”
Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.
Hooray!

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