Obama's Plan to Socialize Health Care

Here's a prediction: Within five years (if not sooner), the U.S. will have full-blown socialized medicine under President Barack Obama.

Now, like many, you might say: Obama's plan doesn't call for socialized medicine.

Well, in response, we'd like to reply: It doesn't need to. However, here's how Obama's plan will result in total and complete socialized medicine.

Obama has a plan that he likes to brag about. You can check it out here on his website. At first glance, the plan sounds too good to be true. Well, that's because it is.

Simply put, here's how the plan will work:

Develop the government plan to cover the uninsured. Companies (and individuals), as Obama like to say, will be able to keep their own insurance plan if they choose.

Obama's Plan: Bleed 'Em Until They Change Their Minds

However--and here's the catch--Companies will have to pick up 100% of the tab for their employee's insurance. Now since most companies today have their employees pick up some portion of their health care costs (usually ranging from 10 to 30%), the cost increases to employers will be astronomical...

...Or, employers can pay 6% of their payroll to "opt in" to the government plan.

Since smaller employers are having a harder and harder time today paying the health care costs for their employees, they'll be the first to opt in to the government plan. Then you'll see larger ones to the same as those larger employers will find the government's plan to be a cheaper alternative (at first), causing them to dump their employees into the government plan.

Here's a pretty good synopsis of Obama's plan:

Obama's economic plan also includes a "pay or play' mandate requiring companies to either pay for health insurance for 100 percent of their full-time employees or pay 6% of their total payroll into a federally designed fund. According to Ralph R. Reiland, "Obama vs Business & Jobs" (Pittsburgh Tribune Review (10/13/2008), small employers currently face average costs of $7,600 per year insurance coverage for an employee with a family. For a small business with thin margins that can afford to cover only 10 of its 50 employees, Obama's full-coverage mandate under the "play" option, at $7,600 per employee, comes with a job-killing price tag of $304,000 per year for the coverage of the other 40 employees.

One key statement in the above-cited article is very telling: Obama's idea is to have the government absorb severe costs, although he has not spelled out the details or where the funds would come from. [Emphasis added.]

Now, like everything else in life, there's no such thing as a free lunch (except if you're a politician, a Big Labor Fat Cat, or a Wall St. exec.), once more workers get dumped into Obama's government plan, the costs will rise. Once that happens, all Americans are going to foot the bill for another failed government plan through higher taxes or bigger deficits.

That's it in a nutshell, folks....How our health care will be socialized through a simple (and costly) "feel good" scheme.

For those of you who might say: Well, what alternative is there? Here's a radical idea for you: Get the government out of health care and open it up to a truly free market--something that hasn't existed in health care since 1964.

In closing, we'd like to offer this in answer to Tom Brokaw's question during the last debate as to whether health care is a "right". In 1993, Dr. Leonard Piekoff gave an address entitled "Health Care is Not a Right." It is worth a read considering that the debate over socialized medicine goes beyond the mere economics to the moral and philosophical question: What constitutes a right?

Note: Although the above address was given in 1993, during the last battle over socialized medicine, it is still very relevant. Since 1993, times have changed and, as socialists (like those Labor Bosses who have been pushing it since we were in unions) argue more vociferously for government to nationalize health care, there seems to be no clear voice on the opposite end of the spectrum.