Government Health Care in Stealth Mode

One video is worth a thousand words (or, as in this column, about 730). The video in question, put together by a group called Verum Serum, shows public statements by three advocates of single-payer (government monopoly) health insurance explaining that a health care bill with a "government option" would move America toward a single-payer government health care system. You may not have heard of the first two, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and professor Jacob Hacker. But you have heard of the third, President Barack Obama.

Schakowsky is a left-wing Democrat from the north side of Chicago and adjacent suburbs and, as chief deputy whip, part of the House Democratic leadership. The video shows her speaking to an enthusiastic group last April. She cites an insurance company spokesman as saying, "A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer." The audience cheers. "My single-payer friends," she goes on, "he was right." Later she adds, "This is not a principled fight. This is a fight about strategy for getting there, and I believe we will."

Schakowsky sounds self-assured but angry, perhaps because her husband, Robert Creamer, served five months in prison a few years ago for bank fraud and failure to pay withholding taxes. Hacker, Yale's Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, sounds friendly and cheerful in appearances recorded in January 2007 and July 2008. With a government option plan, he says in 2007, "You can at least make the claim that there's a competitive system between the public and the private sector," but he predicts that the government option "would eliminate the small group insurance."

Speaking of the government option in 2008, he says, "Someone told me this was a Trojan horse for single-payer. Well, it's not a Trojan horse, right? It's just right there. I'm telling you. We're going to get there, over time, slowly, but we'll move away from reliance on employer-based health insurance as we should, but we'll do it in a way that we're not going to frighten people into thinking they're going to lose their private insurance. We're going to give them a choice of public and private insurance when they're in the pool, and we're going to let them keep their private employer-based insurance if their employer continues to provide it."

Of course, there's no guarantee employers will. Many employers, single-payer advocates hope, will be happy to let their employees go onto the government plan. The Lewin Group, cited often by various analysts, estimates that a government-option plan, depending on how the law is written, could move as many as 100 million households off private insurance and onto the government plan in a few years.

Obama has never made his ultimate goal a secret; it's the same as Schakowsky's and Hacker's. The video shows him saying in October 2003, when he was running for the U.S. Senate, "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program." He adds, "We may not get there immediately," noting the Democrats must "take back" the White House and both houses of Congress -- a condition fulfilled last Jan. 20.

Campaigning for president in May 2007, he says, "But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately." That seems to imply that his goal remains the same as it was in 2003. "There's going to be potentially some transition process -- I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out, where we've got a much more portable system." Which of course government health insurance would be. You couldn't get away from it. The president's defenders depict this video and others like it as a patchwork of irrelevant and misleading statements. They also cite Obama's oft-repeated pledges that any health care bill he would sign would let you keep the insurance you have. They don't address the point, raised by Hacker, that you can't keep it if your employer stops offering it.

But, as Schakowsky says, "This is not a principled fight." Schakowsky, Hacker and Obama believe, out of idealism but also perhaps for crass political reasons, that America would be better off with a single-payer system like Canada's or Britain's. But they realize that they're operating in a country where most voters don't agree. The video helps us understand how they're seeking to reach their single-payer goal through government-option stealth.

Yeah but we need to get rid of our fixation on the MSM. Drudge does not have to follow the MSM and a lot of the time he doesn’t. We need to quit judging our success or failure by the response of the MSM. That is an exercise in futility. They are liberals what do we expect them to do but support other liberals? The mistake many conservatives make is that many want to pretend there is no divide that some how if they try to have an honest debate with the left that they will not only be able to have such a debate that some how the left will see reason. This is crazy they don’t see reason and they continue to push their horrible ideas until they have couched them in such a way as to make it very difficult not to support them.

They have did this with global warming, they have did this with sexual activism, they are doing it increasingly with health care. It is on every front that they are pushing an agenda that attempts to marginalize and demonize its opposition and stifle debate so that their big government interventionist plans can be realized whether it is in telling you what kind of car to drive, how many kids you can have, how much money you can make, what doctor you can see and what drugs are cost effective for you. The left have the goal of slowly but surely eliminating the right of the individual to make any truly substantive decisions in the way their communities are run and their lives are lived.
We are moving towards world where all options will be enumerated by bureaucrats and where disagreement with bureaucrats will be seen as the difference between right and wrong.

Evil has at its heart the twisting of what is good into dark caricatures where good things like human kindness and charity become instead guilt driven obligation driven by envy and fueled by what would in any other case be called thievery. It takes moral uprightness and integrity and twists them into ego driven narcissistic depravity with rigidity defined by childish fictions. It takes faith and hope and twists them into faithless reliance and blind allegiance to imperfect leaders who not only have not proven themselves good stewards of our trust but have proven themselves to have the fiscal skills of drunk gamblers who see the US Citizen as sheep to be shorn in pursuit of their personal power.

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