Obamacare – Socialized Health Care

Notwithstanding the coordinated state-run media campaign denying it, Obama has made his goal of socialized medicine clear -- in his recorded comments from 2003, his presidential campaign rhetoric, and his virtual endorsement of the public-option-infested House plan. Howard Dean, for his part, has been on TV hawking his health care "reform" book and unable to resist the puerile pleasure of revealing his insider knowledge.

In 2003, while belittling the United States for not providing universal health insurance despite our being "the wealthiest country in the history of the world," Obama unequivocally stated that he was "a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program." During the 2008 presidential campaign, he again endorsed the "public option." These statements were not taken out of context despite Linda Douglass' transparently lame denials.

Every politically literate person understands that government-run health care is what we're fighting about. That's what the legitimate town hall protestors are up in arms about, and that's what the phony, ACORN-y, Astro-agitators who have been bused in by Obama are beating people up over. So spare us the insult of denying it.

Even if Obama is forced to abandon the public option temporarily, it will probably be mere semantic abandonment. The CATO Institute's Michael Tanner argues that the compromise plan being considered by six members of the Senate Finance Committee would eliminate the public option in name only. A health insurance co-op plan, he says, is just another name for government-run health insurance.

But Howard Dean revealed a more cynical Democratic strategy, which would obviate the co-op charade. Dean told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that the Senate's removal of the public option is a ploy to get the bill through the Senate and then have the public option reinserted at the reconciliation stage, where it would only require 50 votes, not a supermajority. Dean admitted that "the president knows very well that you aren't really going to have health care reform without a public option. But he also knows he has to get this out of the Senate."