Although its internal contradictions disqualify Barack Obama’s health care “plan” as a serious reform proposal, it has served to highlight the essential statism that animates the “universal health care” movement.
The advocates of “universal health care” have been generally disappointed by the plan, primarily because it doesn’t apply the heavy hand of government with sufficient verve. Jonathon Cohn, for example, complains that individuals would be left with too much personal autonomy:
There is … no requirement that every adult American have health insurance … Obama doesn’t want to make people buy insurance …
Ezra Klein is equally distressed at the lack of government interference in the private sector. He laments the absence of economy-killing burdens on business:
The Obama plan isn’t nearly so vicious to the employer link as I’d prefer.
Rose Ann DeMoro is incensed by Obama’s assumption that patients are thinking buyers of medical services rather than cattle being led to the government-owned health care trough:
The first misconception in the health care debate is the portrait of all of us as “consumers” of health care. [Obama’s plan] is yet the latest to perpetuate the present misguided system that sacrifices all of us to this concept.
And so it goes. The advocates of “universal health care” are less interested in health care reform than in enabling federal annexation of a huge portion of our economy.
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