Taking Away Freedom
Mark Steyn takes a look at HillaryCare v2.0 and really does not like what he sees.
Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.
Hooray!And, if you don’t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.
Er, hang on, where’s that in the Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law?
That’s a major surrender of freedom from the citizen to the state. “So what?” says the caring crowd. “We’ve got to do something about those 40 million uninsured! Whoops, I mean 45 million uninsured. Maybe 50 by now.” This figure is always spoken of as if it’s a club you can join but never leave: The very first Uninsured-American was ol’ Bud who came back from the Spanish-American War and found he was uninsured and so was first on the list, and then Mabel put her back out doing the Black Bottom at a tea dance in 1926 and she became the second, and so on and so forth, until things really began to snowball under the Bush junta. And, by the time you read this, the number of uninsured may be up to 75 million.
Nobody really knows how many “uninsured” there are: Two different Census Bureau surveys conducted in the same year identify the number of uninsured as A) 45 million or B) 19 million. The first figure is the one you hear about, the second figure apparently entered the Witness Protection Program. Of those 45 million “uninsured Americans,” the Census Bureau itself says over 9 million aren’t Americans at all, but foreign nationals. They have various health care back-ups: If you’re an uninsured Canadian in Detroit, and you get an expensive chronic disease, you can go over the border to Windsor, Ontario, and re-embrace the delights of socialized health care; if you’re an uninsured Uzbek, it might be more complicated. Of the remaining 36 million, a 2005 Actuarial Research analysis for the Department of Health and Human Services says that another 9 million did, in fact, have health coverage through Medicare.
Steyn goes on to point out that a lot of the "uninsured" are either choosing to opt out for now or are rotating in and out of insurance coverage due to job changes and the like. So we have a solution that is actually in search of a problem. And more of your rights and freedoms are being taken away in the name of doing what is for your own good. And have no fear, the increasingly authoritarian left knows better than you do what is good for you. Just ask them.
Just don't ask them for any freedom.
By Mwalimu Daudi, Sunday, 23 September , 2007 @ 10:19 am
When HillaryCare V2.0 breaks the American economy, we will be treated to HillaryCare V3.0: Be healthy under penalty of law. Violators (meaning sick people) will be prosecuted.
Snark? Maybe not.
By FedUp, Sunday, 23 September , 2007 @ 11:42 am
LESSE… is this wunnerful program mandatory for EVERYONE or do our little piggies in DC get exempted for their own precious plan? Seems like they should be the first to sign up and give up their bennies!