Notwithstanding some minor tinkering, the U.S. Senate has now passed the government takeover of healthcare. And despite the fact that it may not contain all of the far left’s extreme demands, it is almost impossible to overstate the nefarious effect of what has emerged.
As Barack Obama has rightly intoned, even as now written, without the “public option,” the measure embodies the single most massive government entitlement program since social security. One-sixth of the economy will be summarily placed in the hands of federal bureaucrats. And the greatest health care system in the history of the world will be torn asunder.
Yet, as horrifying as all of that may be, it is just the beginning. Because like the Pale Rider of biblical prophecy, “hell will follow after it.”
The Democrats have already made clear that the current bill is just the opening salvo of their all-out assault on every aspect of private health care. As Tom Harkin (D-IA) has said, “What we are buying here is a modest home, not a mansion. But, we can build additions as we go along … In the future, amending it and changing it isn’t going to be as tough as passing it in the first place. We amend Medicare and Social Security all the time …That’s what we will do in health care.”
As Harkin and others have also made clear, a binding public option is inevitable. Full funding of abortions is simply a matter of some minor tinkering. And then, once the new law has inserted the federal government into every aspect of health care, a sprawling new “Department of Health” will be created, empowered to control who receives which medical procedure and – even more chilling – who does not.
And even that doesn’t begin to address the full scope of the bill’s malevolent intent. More than anything else, the government health care takeover is a sinister political move to insulate the Democrats in power for decades to come.
If the Democrats are allowed to implement their strategy of using the current bill as a foothold to gain a stranglehold, they will then use their newfound power to “redistribute the health” in order to establish a middle-class dependency on bureaucratic dictates and federal subsidies.
As the popular leftwing website TPM recently observed in its editorial “The Death of Conservatism”: “[The bill] will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”
So, how do conservatives and/or Republicans fight back against this blatant power grab? They have two alternatives left.
First, the Republicans in both the Senate and the House must use any means necessary to prevent the bill’s final passage. That may require the most expensive, extensive political ad campaign in TV history. It may also require the most aggressive – and, to some, acrimonious – public attacks in political history. And it will most certainly require the deftest parliamentary machinations in congressional history. In fact, it will likely require all three.
Then, should the bill pass anyway, political activists at the grassroots level must extract an Election Day toll on Senate and House members in marginal seats that will make wayward politicians shudder for decades to come. Even waiting until 2012 will be too late; the Democrat strategy of control and subsidize will already be too far advanced. The electoral pogrom must begin immediately.
The Senate has now passed the government takeover of health care over the objections of the vast majority of Americans. All that remains to be determined is whose hell “will follow after it.”
