Even more scary than the projected $2.5 trillion cost of nationalized health management (it certainly is not about health care) in the coming decade is the presumption of myriad under-the-radar assurances from the Obama camp to Senate lawmakers who are risking everything to pass the worst bill in American history.
We know what they’ve been promised on the table. We know Sens. Dodd, Landrieu and Nelson et al were granted massive windfalls that they presumably will convert into political capital and re-election votes in the future. But some of these Democrats (and Joe Lieberman) are so lockstep, so addicted to the Obama Socialism Kool-Aid and so willing to commit apparent career suicide to hijack the U.S. economy, one can only wonder what else they’ve been promised by Chief Thug Rahm Emanuel.
They’re acting like the young men who make the ultimate sacrifice in a public square or behind the controls of a fuel-laden jetliner in return for the promise of an eternity spent in the company of compliant virgins. It is mind boggling. And it is deeply troubling because recruits to the Socialist training camps under the Obama regime are not disenfranchised youths but fellow adult Americans elected to serve us, not to destroy us.
Consider for example senior Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D). Appearing last weekend on Fox News Sunday (watch the video clip if you can stomach it: sens-conrad-klobuchar-on-fns), hours after Nelson agreed to be the 60th vote backing Harry Reid’s secretly crafted bill, she was asked point blank by show host Chris Wallace about public opinion. Why do all of the Senate Democrats want to hasten passage of a bill opposed (according to Rasmussen Reports polling) by 55% of Americans.
Her response is not only alarming but completely inaccurate. Klobuchar harkens to the decades of debate about Medicare prior to it being signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. She contends only 28% of the American population supported Medicare but soon changed their minds when they realized how great entitlements can be.
Turns out there was far more robust support for Medicare by 1965 — compulsory medical insurance was supported by 63% in a January 1965 Gallup poll (Cato Institute, Medicare’s Origin: The Economics and Politics of Dependency, 1993). It seems Johnson was far more effective at lobbying for a “Great Society” than has been the Obama camp at imposing “Change”. And LBJ did without 24/7 cable TV.
Two-thirds of Americans were OK with the idea of Medicare when it passed; today, RealClearPolitics tracks a set of polls showing 51% opposing a federal takeover of our health insurance system. But, more significantly, only about 39% support the scam. Huge difference. Sen. Klobuchar is delusional, but I guess that’s not exactly a news flash.
As Cato’s Charlotte Twight concluded in a lengthy 1993 report — written during the HillaryCare uprising — Senators in 1965 knew exactly what they were doing and knew the consequences. In this regard, they share an historical bond with today’s elected criminals.
“They … knew that Medicare would create a vast new public dependence on the federal government for financial security in old age, continuing the pattern set by Social Security in 1935,” Twight wrote. “Senator Mundt (R., S.D.) described it as ‘another step toward destroying the independence and self-reliance in America which is the last best hope of individual freedom for all mankind’ (U.S. Cong. Rec.-Senate 9 July 1965: 16122).”
Medicare was an idea whose time seemed to have come in 1965. We have watched it become a mismanaged, unsustainable federally orchestrated fiasco. ObamaCare will make Medicare look like a mere blip on the screen of the history of America and its decline.