Obama’s Health Care Push -- Destroy for Socialized Medicine

The Wall Street Journal reports (link) today that the Chinese are very critical of Obama’s fiscal management as they increasingly worry about the ability of America to repay its massive debt, much of which is owned by the Chinese themselves. And a big part of that fiscal mismanagement is Obama’s and the Democrats' relentless push for ObamaCare, with the unwillingness to try sensible alternative market-based and patient-centered reforms, all in the face of a massive federal deficit and unprecedented peacetime spending orgy.

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson writes today (link) in a piece titled Obama’s Malpractice:

Recovering slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that … a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending, and curb massive future deficits…. So, what do they [the Democrats] do? Just the opposite. Their sweeping overhaul of the health care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse…. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it…. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them [Obama and the Democrats] to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.

So why are the Democrats pursuing this reckless and destructive path? John Steele Gordon writes (link) today at Commentary Magazine’s Contentions group blog:

Obama, Pelosi & Co. see this as a one-time opportunity to make socialized medicine inevitable. By destroying the current health-care system under the name of reform, they would make single-payer unavoidable…. [Obama] is bent on sharply shifting power in the direction of the government, away from individuals and the free market, and is willing to defy both the public and fiscal sanity to achieve this goal.

John M Greco