Wrong Way Still (IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure)

IBD Editorials ^ | September 2, 2009 | INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY Staff

[Kaslin]

Health Care: A beleaguered White House apparently has abandoned its government-run option. Even so, ObamaCare will still be a thousand-page, trillion-dollar step toward socialized medicine.

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President Bill Clinton and his erstwhile adviser Dick Morris liked to "triangulate." Top Obama political aide David Axelrod told Politico that the president's post-August recess strategy on health care will be to "synthesize and harmonize."

The administration intends to drop the controversial "public option" to rival private employer plans. Independent health care experts have warned that the artificially low premiums and other enticements a government plan would offer could lead to tens of millions of customers lost for private insurers — and thus the collapse of the health insurance industry.

The president's liberal base won't like the concession. But the key point in the Politico report is that "some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one."

"Incremental" means that even without the public option, Democrats will still be trying to take America's health care system — the best, most envied in the world — to the same destination. Just not so fast.

And what might that destination be? Single payer, which means a total government takeover.

President Obama told the AFL-CIO in 2003 that he was "a proponent of single-payer universal health care coverage . . . that's what I'd like to see."

[Kaslin]

[Kaslin]

Dick Morris is on the factor as I type with Laura Ingram