End Game
What's the future of healthcare after the Dems pass their bill? More regulation, more taxation, more redistribution - or so the liberals are promising themselves.
It might be helpful to compare this bill to the Social Security Act of 1935, which, when passed, had some really bad elements. Most significantly, the bill excluded domestic and agricultural workers, which meant a large number of poor workers, especially African Americans, were not eligible for retirement or disability benefits. (The provisions were, of course, inserted to get the votes of southern senators who controlled key committees.) It also required people to pay into the bill for several years before seeing benefits.
But subsequent legislation in the 1950s and 1960s expanded those covered to the point that it became a fairly universal component of the American welfare state. Indeed, even Barry Goldwater consistently voted on Social Security expansion in the 1950s Senate. Now today is certainly different in the Senate but Social Security shows that adjustments that broaden existing systems are far easier to pass than the creation of new components of a welfare state.
If this is the end of health care legislation, I too would be dissatisfied. But logically, it can be seen as the second step after medicare/medicaid toward the creation of a broadly universal health care system.
The question for conservatives and free-marketeers, now more than ever, is to agree among ourselves on a positive vision of a healthcare future - and then see if we can beat the libs at their own game, steering the system in the direction in which we'd like it to go. Things are moving, and if we don't develop a better strategy than we have had for guiding that movement, the movement will proceed in directions we won't like.