Byron links us to an article by Chris Hedges, a leftist writer, who offers us an analysis of Obamacare from the perspective of the far-left. They're not happy campers and they shouldn't be. What the media is calling health care reform is, in Hedges' view, little more than a massively expensive pork barrel project that will wind up helping very few people:
The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014.
Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.
The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: "This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?" Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get?
As is sometimes the case the value of the Left is that they often make us aware of problems we might otherwise have overlooked. They were right to call our attention to the need to reform health care. The problem is that their solutions to the problems they diagnose are often awful. In this case Hedges' solution is total government control of health care, a solution which is crushingly expensive and which has worked well nowhere else in the world.
In order to pay for the current plan, Charles Krauthammer predicts, there will by next year be a massive effort to pass a national European-style sales tax. This, if it transpires, would violate another of President Obama's pledges to the American people, i.e. his promise that no one making less than $250,000 would see their taxes go up.
RLC