PrintFebruary 7, 2007
Give me your tired, your poor... and two trillion dollars!
You can't fault Hillary for a lack of ambition. The last time we heard about HillaryCare was in 1994, when the healthcare sector was one-seventh of the US economy. Now our Gross Domestic Product is 12.5 trillion dollars a year and healthcare is one-sixth of that, or more than two trillion dollars. That's two with 12 zeros after it.
Just to get an idea --- 2 trillion bucks is nearly the total annual output of countries like France, Britain, Germany or China.
That's what it would cost if Hillary has her way.
Because HillaryCare is back, of course. Like the corpse that keeps coming back to life, it will be all over the campaign --- even if Mrs. Clinton tries to smother it with a pillow to hide it from view. Cradle-to-the-grave medical care is just too big a part of the Left's agenda to ignore. Obama is already pushing his version, outflanking Hillary on the Left. But Senator Clinton is not likely to want to repeat the disaster of 1994, when the GOP gained a House majority for the first time in half a century because voters saw that HillaryCare was a gigantic grab for power --- a vast empire to be managed by Nurse Ratched, complete with racial quotas, centralized assignment of doctors to inner city neighborhoods, and any other goodies Hillary and Ira Magaziner took it in their heads to pile on. So she may not talk about it during the campaign. But it's there, all right.
HillaryCare tears the veil from the Left's pose of compassion more than anything else. Nothing exposes the intellectual poverty of liberalism as clearly. Because --- suppose you are a well-meaning liberal who is really worried about the ten percent of our population who don't have health insurance. What would you do if you were honest, and not just trying to score political points?
Well, one thing to consider is a compromise with Republicans on tax credits for private health insurance. You might study the Heritage Foundation free market proposals, and Mitt Romney's attempt to put them into practice in Massachusetts. You would learn from economists about the efficiency of markets, and because you were an open-minded and compassionate person, you wouldn't care who received the political credit --- as long as people were being helped.
What Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats keep doing is just the opposite. Rather than look for a compromise that would help people, without a Stalinesque monopoly over a two-trillion dollar slice of our economy, the Left just throws mud pies at free market proposals. Market ideas are just a plot of the rich against the poor, or some other piece of standard demagogy of the Left. Bottom line, Hillary Clinton ends up harming the very people she claims to care about --- because she insists on total control over those two trillion bucks' worth of economic activity. That's why HillaryCare is a power grab rather than a serious public policy proposal. The numbers never made sense.
Democrats are therefore neither intellectually or morally serious about health care for the uninsured. It is just another example of how the Dems have turned into a political machine whose only justification is its quest for power. Free market proposals might help millions of people, but they would not empower the Democrats. They are never even talked about on the Left. Instead, the American Left is green-eyed with envy about the locked-in control of Socialist parties in Europe.
Hillary, Obama and all the others are telling us very clearly what they really stand for: Untrammeled power. That's what the rhetoric of compassion really comes down to, just a giant lever to perpetuate the liberal ruling class.
I simply can't vote for Democrats any more --- or for phony Republicans like Governor Arnie --- as long as they are so deeply dishonest and obsessed with unrestrained control. Europe is the logical outcome of that, as we can see in Britain, where the majority of laws are now made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Parliament is now just a powerless talking fest.
If we had a responsible Democrat Party we would have solved Social Security insolvency by now. We would have covered the uninsured. We would have improved the cruel and destructive inner city schools--- if only the Left cared enough.
We know the Democrats are wildly irresponsible in foreign policy. But they are equally empty-headed domestically. This is a sad thing. If voters understood the Left accurately, they would go the way of the Whigs. The Dems only manage to cling to power because they have stacked the media and Hollywood with their empty-headed and narcissistic minions. Take that away, and they would fall apart.
New blood would be enormously beneficial for the Left and for the United States, which needs two vigorous, intellectually open parties, competing for our support.
James Lewis is the pen name of a regular contributor. He blogs at www.dangeroustimes.com
