Mark Steyn elaborates. The President's speech was a failure, but it turns out, that doesn't matter
.it was a joke. Or, rather, it would be a joke if the president’s intention was to persuade an increasingly skeptical if not downright hostile electorate. On the other hand, if the intention is to ram it down America’s throat whatever the citizenry thinks, then the joke’s on us.Useless to claim we won't be treating illegal immigrants. What are we going to do with a dying man on our doorstep, turn him away?
The minute a first-world country has “free” health care, it becomes the provider of choice to anyone who can get there, particularly for any long-term ailments requiring state-of-the-art medications. In 2004, Britain’s Health Protection Agency revealed that 44 percent of HIV patients being treated by the National Health Service were not residents of the United Kingdom at all, but from southern Africa. In essence, a huge number of AIDS patients in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho have decided to outsource their health-care needs to British taxpayers. Similar trends will manifest themselves here in nothing flat.
But putting that aside, the point is that health care reform is sleight of hand.
In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?Well, because the 90% have troubles if they try to switch jobs.
In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health-care portability?Uh...
Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.And that is the point.
Three stories bubbled up in the last week, although if you read the New York Times and the administration’s other airbrushers you’ll be blissfully unaware of them; the resignation of Van Jones — former (?) Communist and current 9/11 “truther” — from his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar”; the “re-assignment” of Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts after he was found to be urging government-funded arts groups to produce “art” in support of Obama policy positions; and, finally, the extraordinary undercover tape from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website in which officials from ACORN (the Obama chums who’ll be “helping” with the next census) offer advice on how pimps can get government housing loans for brothels employing underage girls from El Salvador.What all these people have in common is devotion to big Soviet-style government against individual liberty. And so forth, coming to The Hill's same conclusion:
My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.
