ObamaCare About Ideology, Not Health

Going back to the time before abortion became, as Sonja Sotomayor says, settled law, the left insisted that “the government should stay out of a woman’s body,” and that a woman’s reproductive health, i.e., her right to kill her unborn baby, was “between her and her doctor.” Now that the issue is another one of their Holy Grails, healthcare, they insist that the government get into everybody’s body and that you and your doctor should have very little to say about it.

When Obama was campaigning he promised that we all could have health insurance plans just like members of the Washington mafia, otherwise known as Congress. But when the 1500 word plan appeared, Congress and all federal employees were excluded. He also claimed that you could keep your current plan. Forget that: the Lewin Group projects that 83 million people will lose their insurance because employers will drop their plans and pay the 8% additional payroll tax instead.

Although there are 1,300 insurers competing for the business, Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, says we need a government insurance provider, the so-called Public Option, “to keep the private insurers honest.” Then why don’t we need a government auto insurance option? For that matter, since food is a greater need than health insurance, why not have government farms and grocery stores? No, the purpose of the public option is to drive out private companies with a taxpayer-subsidized competitor, leaving the government as the sole provider.

The two reasons we need a government system, say proponents, are the 45 million uninsured and to reign in rising costs. Re: the uninsured, see this blog, June 25"Politics Trumps Healthcare." As for reducing costs, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office said that Obamacare would not significantly reduce the upward trajectory of healthcare spending and would, over ten years, add $239 billion in budget deficits.

Now Obama says he will pay for this socialist fantasy by putting a surtax on people earning over one million dollars per year, pushing our top tax bracket above those of France and Italy. He believes taxpayers will not change their behavior in response to incentives, in this case negative incentives,to avoid higher taxes. Plus, there is less money to be had here because this is the group whose income has been hit the hardest by the current downturn.

Obama and the Congressional Democrat leaders, like all socialists, are levelers. What they want, on purely ideological grounds, is a European/Canadian-style, government run system with equal, albeit lower quality, healthcare for everyone. Except, of course, themselves.