Obama at the AMA

By Joseph Finlay

In what has become a predictable opening salvo to every proposal and initiative of the new Adminstration, President Obama used the backdrop of fear and disaster on Monday in an attempt to gain traction with the American Medical Association for healthcare reform - even using the metaphor of "a ticking time bomb" and comparing the plight of Government Motors to our healthcare system:

President Barack Obama on Monday warned doctors the U.S. healthcare system was a ticking time bomb and urged them to support his overhaul plan, which includes a public insurance program that many of them view with skepticism. Obama took his healthcare campaign to the annual meeting of the influential American Medical Association in Chicago, where he likened the U.S. healthcare system to struggling General Motors, which has filed for bankruptcy protection. "If we do not fix our healthcare system, America may go the way of GM; paying more, getting less, and going broke," he said.

"Make no mistake: the cost of our healthcare is a threat to our economy," said Obama, who wants a healthcare reform bill on his desk by October. "It is a ticking time bomb for the federal budget. And it is unsustainable for the United States of America."

Orwellian double speak and cognitive dissonance are on full display with this sort of logic. Was it not in large part the overreach of the UAW that sunk the GM Titanic? So, if GM went broke largely from paying for healthcare as the President intimates, then how will the federal government avoid the same fate? And with liberal bailout policies and nationalization schemes, aren't we and our posterity already doomed to "paying more, getting less, and going broke?"

Lastly, if the best healthcare system in the world is a "ticking time bomb," then what does that make the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, North Korea, or jihadist cell ? Relativism at its worst from an Administration in perpetual campaign mode.