Headed for socialized health care?
Even avoiding the usual sources of polemics in the political debate over the Democrats’ health care legislation, one continually encounters dramatic predictions of its consequences.
Like this piece in U.S. News & World Report.
After a yearlong, rancorous debate–and over the objections of the American people–the House of Representatives voted to establish a socialized healthcare system in the United States, something that has been a dream of progressives and Democrats for at least the last 60 years.
The new program, which by most measures is the largest single new entitlement program to be enacted since the New Deal, is a giant leap down the road toward making the United States a European-style social democracy in which the government, organized labor, and big business work together to reach welfare state objectives at the expense of economic growth and considerable personal liberty in the marketplace.
With Sunday’s vote, the die has been cast; it is highly unlikely that a new GOP majority in Congress–which many seem to believe is now all but guaranteed–will vote to repeal the measure come January 2011. Even if the Republicans do, it is a certainty that President Barack Obama will refuse to sign it. And no one is predicting there will be enough Republican votes alone to override the veto he will be sure to issue.
In the end, the whole matter turned on the issue of abortion.
And we’ve been going down that road for a long time now…
One gentleman wrote me with a thought experiment, taking Bart Stupak’s brief remarks in his press conference saying he’d changed his mind, and simply changing the circumstances. The abortion/slavery analogy is an apt one and we hear it often. Here’s a different spin on how capitulation sounds on a moral issue of marginalized human life:
“I really am against persecuting and killing Jews and that is why I introduced the amendment to the Nazi agenda. But I lost the vote and there were so many good things in their agenda like better roads, stronger economy, educational improvements, that I couldn’t go against the entire agenda. Isn’t compromise what we’re about. But make no mistake, I am not anti-Semitic.”
Pro-life people…..who are always referred to in the press as ‘anti-abortion’…..get this. Seems anyone willing to critically think it through should as well.
