I plead guilty of negligence in writing anything more about Democrat proposals for health care.  That's because the Dems have been doing what amounts to a shell game with health care.  They've floated any number of plans, avoided putting their proposals into the form of actual legislation or alternatively, putting out such a massive proposal it was impossible to read and digest prior to voting.  All of this has conveyed the unmistakable message:  they don't want the public to know what they are up to.  One thing that is for sure,  all plans result in the eventual termination of private insurance, cost astronomical amounts of money, and create a brand new entitlement that will be impossible to revoke once it's shown we can't pay for it.

The health care industry in this country constitutes about 6% of the overall economy.  That makes health care a lynch-pin industry in the progressive march to create a fascist economy (and I don't mean 'fascist' in the WWII politically-charged definition, I mean it in the Mussolini government-corporate entity partnership in which government is the dominatrix and corporations the dominated).  Thus we see the sleight-of-hand tactics of Dem leadership, along with the arm-wrenching of resistant moderate Dems and piecrust promises to the one red-light district Republican.  Clearly, the Dem leadership is willing to gamble on future electability of those members who give it its majority today in order to get through this progressive agenda...out of concern for America's uninsured?  Hardly.

The heavy hand of progressive fascism is seen in the onerous penalties carried in the recently-passed health care bill, which can be described as "Lose a policy, go to jail".  Burdensome fees and fines ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 come complete with jail time ranging from 6 months to 5 years.  A "middle income" family of 4 must provide coverage that will cost no less than $15,000 per year --that's $1,250 a month in new costs! -- or else.  And how exactly does that work in a job-lacking, consumer-shy economic crisis?

It doesn't, of course.  It removes whatever disposable income might be left to middle income America and directs it into a "pool" to subsidize the nation's do-nothing population and its enabling alien worker population.  This is a sure means of prolonging our current economic crisis, and `a la Rahm Emanuel, this particular crisis is certainly not going to waste! 

We took a distinct jump to the left when social security was created in spite of FDR's initial declaration that "...this is the same old dole under another name.  It is almost [almost?  ALMOST??] dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980.  We can't do that.  We can't see the United States short in 1980 anymore than in 1935."  And yet he did, out of political expediency.  He hoped that many of the nation's older workers would retire and leave more jobs for younger workers; that was one way to lessen the unemployment figure quandary that dogged him till the nation's entry into WWII.  Truckin' along that left-hand road, LBJ picked up where Truman and JFK had failed before him, and in the name of JFK's memory, finally got Medicare/Medicaid passed in 1965.  Opposition to a government-run health care plan included the AMA, President Eisenhower (who did agree with Republican plans to subsidize private insurance companies to cover seniors), and Ronald Reagan, who was spokesman for the AMA in 1963.  Reagan organized Operation Coffee Cup, a grassroots plan that involved the wives of physicians who brought neighbors together to write letters, sign petitions, and integrate efforts with other organizations to block a government health plan, recognizing it to be "socialized medicine".  In a speech at the time, Reagan said "...behind it [government health insurance for seniors] will come other Federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.  Until one day, as Norman Thomas has said, we will awake to find we have socialism.  And if you don't do this and I don't do it [oppose the plan], one days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."  Prescient, no?

Progressive Dems continued to press for a nationalized health care system, but willingly targeting employers as being the primary providers of health insurance in the interim.  Yet another step toward the left involved Senator Ted Kennedy's passage of a 1973 bill mandating employers offer HMO coverage in addition to PPO plans.  As a result Kaiser, the main provider of HMO coverage, found itself surrounded by upstart HMOs, most of which failed financially over time and became consolidated into larger plans or disappeared entirely.  Dems at the time believed HMOs would be easier to evolve into a government provided plan in the future, once political power inured on their behalf.  It was an easy transition, they thought, to substitute government for administrator, delusionally believing management of costs without sacrifice to services provided was possible by both entities.  When it didn't work well on the private level, (by 2001 Kennedy was condemning denial of service by HMOs and advocating a single payer system) they decided it was because the scale of operation wasn't large enough, and a government plan was the only option.

Roosevelt considered but eventually discarded the idea of government-provided health insurance, favoring unemployment insurance and social security instead and confident the mercurial rise in union membership caused by his Wagner Act would grow employer-provided health insurance.  Truman, the first serious banger of the government health care drum, made several attempts to pass his plan.  "The greatest gap in our social security structure is the lack of adequate provision for the Nation's health...I have often and strongly urged that this condition demands a national health program.  The heart of the program must be a national system of payment for medical care based on well-tried insurance principles...".  Although Truman's call for an all-inclusive plan was rejected, a scaled down version covering only the elderly gained a bit in popularity, triggering the Republican response of subsidizing private insurance companies to do so (something Dems rejected; both parties historically opposed each other for no other reason than they were the opposition, something that is unchanged today).  JFK's approach was to liken government-provided senior health care insurance to social security, saying "We're not asking for anybody to hand this out, we are asking for a chance for the people who will receive the benefit to earn their way - the same principle established under the Social Security system in the 30s."  Except today we know that the system established in the 30s was a Ponzi scheme, that FDR's concerns about sloughing off a deficit to the future was real, and that Social Security will be running a deficit in just a couple of years from now.

When my grandmother died in 1972 my father received the final billing from her last hospital stay.  The cost was over $100,000, an amount that caused astonishment (over the cost) and gratitude (over the cost) that Medicare was picking up the tab.  My grandmother left no estate.  She lived her final years off social security and a military widow's pension from my grandfather because of his WWI service.  That final hospital bill would never have been paid, if not for the government.  So.  Is it any surprise that hospitals and their administration have not come out against the Obama administration's plans for government health care?

But what about doctors, who have been reduced in Medi/Medi reimbursement rates to the point that many of them no longer receive their expenses back?  What will happen to nurses' salaries, the hands-on lifesavers whose hourly rates are so much less than those of auto mechanics?  Why on earth are medical associations representing both groups supporting this nonsense?  How could the AMA have done such a 180 on this issue?  The answer is in numbers.  The AMA membership today is only about 17% of all doctors in the country, as opposed to over 96% in 1963 when Reagan represented them, and support by its leadership for regulation that is detrimental to the well-being of the membership is a big reason for this.  The same situation applies to nurses, who are represented by various unions who behave as most unions do now -- in support of progressive politics over the interests of members.  It has become a progressive tactic to infiltrate existing organizations, such as League of Women Voters, AMA, and AARP, take over the leadership, and then speak on behalf of a membership that simply does not agree.  (AARP's support of Obamacare is only surprising if one forgets that plans in Congress today call for abolishment of the Medicare Advantage plan, something AARP as the #2 provider of Medigap insurance will be only too happy to supply; that's income PLUS political power, an unbeatable enticement.)

In spite of evidence to the contrary at every step along the Leftist Way, progressive Democrats insist government is the only entity that can effectively run health care in this country. I can only conclude that this has nothing to do with a desire to make health care available to all Americans and everything to do with destroying a capitalistic economy.