Mark Steyn on Healthcare

...Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative"). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on
regardless...

Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

So this begs the question, even if healthcare should happen to fail, how do you unwind the entrenched socialist apparatus that is already in place?

The Republicans are complicit in a large part of this problem and while the Tea Party movement has its heart is in the right place demanding loyalty oaths from Republicans it does nothing to marginalize the leftists in the democratic party and, as Steyn points out, the Federal bureaucracy.

The flip side to this is of course the entitlement problem, and I am not refering to the fact that the cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicade and the rest threatens to bankrupt the county. I'm talking about the fact that a large proportion of the population feels it is entitled to what ever freebees are being handed out with no thought to where the money comes from. For example it took less than 8 hours for the the state of Iowa handed out $2.7 million dollars in $200 vouchers for new appliances this week in its Cash for Refrigerators program.

That mindset may be harder to change than averting governments drift toward socialism. Unless someone comes up with a good 12 step program for greed, sloth, and gluttony reform can't be done.