Obamacare: Worth the Price of the 2010 Election

Mark Steyn, with more on the President's unseemly push for the Democratic health care bill, even at the likely cost of the 2010 election:

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year . . .

Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible.  . . 

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

 Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. . .  .  The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too. . . 

 Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out. . . 

. . . Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:

"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."

Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. . . Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Read the whole thing. It's full of great examples.  Think about it. Then, you might want to consider this piece on the Consent of the Governed (and what to do when it is ignored) again. And this video. The best points are at the end.

By the way: Ezra Klein pretty much admits that Steyn is right. though he wishes the shift to the left went further.

The great mystery of the health care debate is why liberals, who don't trust doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies or insurers, trust Congress and federal bureaucrats.

 Darleen suggests that a new ObamaPress bill might be in order to regulate Mr. Klein's business.  Of course, Campaign Finance laws have been passed to impose stringent regulations of this type for non-journalists (though a recent Supreme Court ruling has recently negated some of these regulations).  And the Democrats are considering something along these lines for journalists, too.   Sean Penn has something even more dramatic in mind for regulating journalists.  Totalitarianism IS tempting.

 I'm waiting for price controls on attorney's fees. At least there would be SOME constitutional basis for this. What with all the bright young college kids who will be going into law instead of medicine, SOMETHING will have to be done.