For years, advocates of socialized medicine have cited “the plight of the uninsured” as the primary justification for massive government intervention in the U.S. health care system. Indeed, the quest for ”universal coverage” appeared to be a quasi-religious crusade for these people. True believer Jonathan Cohn epitomized such apparent zealotry in the following passage from his 2007 book, Sick:
To believe in universal health care is to believe that we can do more and do better, all at once — that it is possible to have hospitals full of high technology and emergency departments with room for all comers … and that it is possible to do all of this for everybody.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the promised land: The budget-busting health care “reform” legislation taking shape under the guiding hands of President Obama and his congressional accomplices doesn’t even make a serious attempt to provide universal coverage. About half of the fabled “46 million uninsured” will remain without any health insurance coverage. As Senator Charles Grassley put it:
After raising billions in new taxes, cutting about a half-trillion dollars from Medicare, and imposing stiff new penalties for people who don’t buy insurance and increasing costs for those that do, 23 million people will still not even have health insurance.
There has, however, been a curious absence of outrage from the people who have repeatedly told us that universal coverage was not merely the primary goal of health reform, but a moral imperative as well. In place of the reproaches that one might have expected from these alleged advocates of the uninsured, we hear contented purring. Here’s what our true believer, Jonathan Cohn, wrote in TNR when the Senate bill passed:
For nearly a hundred years, the political system has been debating whether access to basic medical care should be a right all citizens enjoy. When reform passes, the political system will finally render its verdict: “yes.”
Huh? What happened to doing “more and better” for “everybody”? Don’t those 23 million people left behind by Obamacare have a “right” to “basic medical care”? What about all those people who allegedly die because they don’t have health coverage? What about all of those people who allegedly declare bankruptcy because of backbreaking medical bills? What about the moral imperative to cover everyone?
It’s blindingly obvious that it was all BS, just another pious pose by a bunch of cocktail-party progressives who never really gave a damn about the plight of the uninsured or the cause of universal coverage. Cohn and all the others who have acquiesced in this travesty after writing for years about the need for universal coverage have revealed themselves as shallow and hypocritical poseurs.
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