Why Obama’s Health Care Plan Sucks
by Giovanni Pable
It should come as no surprise that Barack Obama’s approval ratings as president are steadily plummeting, considering how poorly he has fared in managing the issue of health care – which he supposedly has invested his political capital on. However the White House spinmeisters would like to explain it, this administration’s proposal to overhaul the country’s health-care system is too far to the left of the American mainstream. For all his grandiloquent rhetoric about ensuring universal health coverage for all Americans, Obama’s sales pitch and its increasing frequency have served only to make more and more people less convinced that this is the kind of reform America needs at this time. Consider the fact that Obama and his liberal allies want to create a public option and include that in the legislative proposal that both houses of Congress must pass. A public option is nothing short of enabling government to make decisions on how individuals should handle their health care needs. This is a huge insult to America’s institutional principles of freedom and self-reliance. Obama’s incessant, repeated mantra of “If you’re satisfied with your doctor, you can keep your doctor” will continue to fall on deaf ears precisely because this administration’s hidden agenda includes, among other things: rationing health care, punishing employers (even in small business) who will not provide mandatory coverage for their employees, diminishing the significance of private health care providers, and for good measure, herding senior citizens into death panels. For a center-right country as the United States, any government program that seeks to restrain free-market values and most essentially the tradition of freedom has no chance of success in any conceivable degree whatsoever. Bill Clinton tried to ram “universal health care” down the nation’s throat nearly fifteen years ago and was rewarded with a lopsided defeat in the midterm elections of that year. For Obama, whose agenda is no different from Clinton’s, American history may very well repeat itself.
