The Stakes

From a Cleveland Plain Dealer column:

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Politics and power -- not anything related to improving health care -- is what this whole, long wrangle has been about from the beginning: Putting the governed in the position of needing the consent of the government to live their lives, and ensuring that promoters of the power of the state do the governing in perpetuity.

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Oh, yes, Obamacare will get a few more people covered. But what "coverage" will mean is merely a place in line to await treatment. That line will grow longer and longer as expenses increase, as care is rationed, as the medical profession shrinks, as the incentives to innovate dry up and blow away, and as a bureaucracy dedicated chiefly to its own growth and preservation shifts the purpose of medicine away from healing and toward the making and enforcement of rules.

In short, we will buy -- at tremendous expense, using money we don't have -- a system far inferior to the one we have now.

There's a partisan political element to this outcome, too. You can see it in the e-mails that Eric Schultz, late of the Al Franken Senate campaign and now spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is busily sending out about Republicans who have called for repeal of the health care takeover bill: They're trying to take away your health care!

You'll hear that over and over again, because it's the line the Democrats believe will keep them in power forever, once they endure just one or two losing election cycles. They think that once the Republicans regain Congress and the presidency, they won't have the guts to follow through on repeal pledges.

But the Republicans must follow through, because that's only half of the Democratic strategy. Here's the other half: Once their bureaucratic, financially unsustainable, lower-quality, lower-access parody of today's excellent health care system structure is fully in place, the Democrats can add a new threat: "Do as you're told, or we'll take away your health care."

That's what happens when you give government power over your life. The state giveth and the state taketh away. Buy insurance or we put you in jail.

The Democrats think you're too stupid to catch on, too incompetent to get organized and too weak to fight back.

They really believe that in one brief moment of uncontested power, they have set in motion a process of subjugation that will radically change not only the politics of America but also the character of its people.

The people need to prove them wrong. And the Republicans the people put in the Congress and the White House need to have the guts to do the right thing for the health of the country and its citizens: Repeal this monster before it can sink its socialistic roots into our soil.