Last week Obama said that fear mongering and scare tactics from the right are the only reasons that universal healthcare proposals have failed. He continued to say that one of these fear tactics is the accusation that he supports socialized medicine. He now claims that he does not support a single-payer health care system despite his desire for a public option, which is government run. I just do not buy it and here is why.
Obama made the following statement in a 2003 speech:
“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program. I see no reason why the US cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see.”
You really cannot get any clearer than that. But like any good politician, he has moved his rhetoric to the middle trying to get votes for a plan that appears to be moderate. This public option is quite clever; however, experts have already shown that the public and private plans cannot co-exist so the end result will be a single payer system.
Even without this knowledge you should be able to see that any universal government healthcare program will be socialized medicine. Even if you bring some costs down, the people that cannot afford it now will probably not be able to afford it then as well. During the election campaign, Obama said he would provide subsides to those who could not afford coverage. Subsides, of course, are taxpayer dollars. That would be socialized. Much like our bankrupt Medicare system.
If you combine this knowledge with his well know economic philosophy of trickle up economics (”we need bottom-up economics”) which is a failed economic model, his rejection of free market vision of government (”In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it, Social Darwinism, every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity”); the fears of a government run socialized healthcare system is not fear mongering. It is a real possibility and a very frightening one at that.
