Dems Haven't Given Up on Single-Payer
John McCain joked last week that by opposing the Senate Democratic healthcare bill, he now finds himself “in complete agreement with Dr. Howard Dean… Dr. Dean, I am with you!”
Dr. Dean let him down. In the end, the Democratic Left rallied to the deal brokered by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid.
There’s a lesson here: Looking to the Democratic Left to break with the Democratic leadership will only disappoint.
Dean and the Democratic Left criticized Reid’s package because, in their judgment, it moves too slowly and too incrementally toward a “single-payer” healthcare system. They dissented over the pace of change, and so could be mollified and persuaded. Conservatives dissented over the destination -- and so could not be.
Dean made his goals clear yesterday on NBC News’ Meet the Press.
Here’s the major problem, David: We have committed in this last week of unseemly scrambling for votes -- we have committed to go down a path in this country where private insurance will be the way that we achieve universal healthcare [emphasis added]. That means we’re going to have a 30-year battle with the insurance industry every time when we try to control costs and try to get them to do things.
It is not a coincidence, David Gregory, that insurance company stocks, health insurance company stocks, hit a 52-[week] high on Friday. So they must know something that the rest of us don’t… This elimination of the public option is the real sticking point… [emphasis added].
Dean wants the profit motive banished from healthcare. Yet, without the profit motive and financial rewards for research, education, and sound patient care, the miracles of modern medicine will stagnate and all of us will suffer.
But give Dean credit. He at least is honest about his goals and intentions, which are government controlled and government rationed healthcare. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about most liberals and leftists, in Congress and elsewhere, who have deceptively employed market-oriented language to push through statist legislation.
Certainly, Obama himself has become expert at employing conservative rhetoric in pursuit of far left public-policy objectives. “It now appears,” he said Saturday, “that the American people will have the vote they deserve on genuine reform that offers security to those who have health insurance, and affordable options for those who do not.”
In fact, as the Heritage Foundation rightly notes, the Senate Democratic healthcare bill promises health insurance insecurity to more than 10 million Americans who will lose their health insurance coverage as new regulations and mandates make such coverage unaffordable for many employers.
Health insurance options, likewise, will be reduced and constrained as power and control are concentrated in Washington. “In effect,” reports Heritage, “the Senate bill would produce the greatest concentration of political and economic power over one major sector of the U.S. economy in the nation’s history.”
Dean and the Democratic Left object because, in their judgment, Obamacare doesn’t concentrate power in Washington quickly and forcefully enough. After all, the Senate Democratic healthcare bill still allows for -- horror of horrors -- private-sector health insurance companies!
But make no mistake. The Reid deal will pave the way for what Dean and the hard Left honestly and forthrightly say that they want: a “single-payer” healthcare system in which private-sector insurers no longer exist and the government monopolizes the healthcare marketplace.
For a glimpse of things to come, consider what’s now transpiring with the student loan business. Rep. George Miller and other Democratic “progressives” are working to consolidate student lending under government control. In the words of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the “reformed” government monopoly will be more cost-effective and efficient because it will “simply stop using banks as the middle man for student loans.”
It’s actually not that simple, and it’s not reform: it’s a monopoly.
Conservatives simply cannot allow this to happen. If there is one thing that we conservatives agree upon it is this: a belief in free enterprise and in the efficacy of markets.