The president has clearly been knocked back on his heels over this whole health care fiasco. It is looking more and more like he will get a bill with “health care” written on it somewhere, so he can have a face-saving talking point, but he is decreasingly likely to get anything close to what he wants.
As Jon Stewart of the Daily Show put it, your plan is in trouble if you have to begin your defense of it by saying, “No, we will not be killing your grandparents.” And then, yesterday Obama left me flummoxed when he said that UPS and FedEx are doing great, while the Post Office is the one that is struggling. Well, struggling is one way to put it — seven billion in the red annually.
And this leaves Obama out in full public view, standing by the chalkboard with chalk in hand, having told the teacher repeatedly that he could draw a round square for us. And having come to the point, it looks like he wants to take a few questions first.
He has said that the health plan he signs would have to be “deficit neutral.” Okay, that’s the square. He also is saying that private medical insurance doesn’t have to worry about competition because the health care plan he would sign will lose buckets of money, just like the Post Office and Medicaid. That’s the circle. Okay. We are all ready. Draw it now.
The government health plan will either be effective and efficient, or it won’t be. If it is, then it will put private companies out of business. If it is not, then it won’t be deficit neutral.
But wait . . . there’s more. There is more than one way to put a private company out of business. What Obama is leaving out of this, and what those who support him are leaving out of this, is the fact that when government competes, government cheats. The government never enters private markets with a “may the best man win” attitude. The government takes its own continued involvement as a necessary given, and if competition for them gets a little too hot, then a bill will start making its way through Congress, making that competition illegal.
If you doubt what I say, just run a little thought experiment. What would happen if UPS and FedEx were allowed to deliver mail of all kinds? How long would the Post Office last? In other words, competing head to head has to illegal when the government “competes.”
I am glad that certain memes are catching on — death panels, evil, and so forth — because all this stuff really is evil. I say that because soft totalitarianism is evil — as I have said before, it is nothing so simplistic as Nazi goons. It is a strange amalgam of Huxley and Orwell, and if this upsets you, just go to your private health care provider, and get your prescription soma dosages upped. It is probably covered.