Posted by Lori Ziganto “Government Health Care ...

Posted by Lori Ziganto

“Government Health Care is not about health care; It’s about Government.” So reads the last line of Mark Steyn’s latest brilliant article, which I strongly suggest that everyone read. He’s right, of course, but I’d go even a step further. It’s not just about government, it’s about a mindset and a freedom-squashed way of life. Once the government becomes more than just a safety net, becomes instead a catch-all stifling protective bubble, it kills freedom and the individual. At it’s core, freedom is meant to be risky. It isn’t safe; it’s just free.

Health care control is how the left intends to achieve their ultimate goals. They looked to Britain, for example, and saw that government health care was the key to total control. Make everything “for the common good”. Protect people from everything, even from themselves and you make them so dependent upon you that they will bend to your every will and you can further your agenda with little resistance. This is difficult, if not impossible, to change once the mindset is ingrained. Elections alone won’t do it. Steyn points that out here:

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter?

This is why Erick Erickson is correct when he calls Democrats, willing to throw themselves on the proverbial grenade by voting for the health care bill, “health care suicide bombers.” It’s accurate because, to them, it isn’t about health care itself; it’s about ideology and statist utopian dreams. Hopeandchange ™ sounded pretty and all, but it was really about fundamental change of our entire Country and the principles upon which it was founded. Once socialized medicine is in place, the fundamental change will occur and, as Steyn pointed out above, it will be next to impossible to roll-back. Remember, it took decades to merely reform welfare a tiny bit and even that didn’t really stick. The entitlement mentality was already starting to reign King. Add health care to that mix, and it becomes despotic.

Steyn explains that further here:

Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.