As bad as health care nationalization is, it could be worse. Under Obamacare, at least people will still be able to hire a doctor and pay them out-of-pocket, if they can afford to do so. Under Canada’s national health care, it is illegal for an individual to pay a doctor. In Canada, you are required to get your health care from the government or not at all. (Or, as the particularly wealthy do, go abroad, outside Canadian jurisdiction.)
How long will this freedom last? Not long, if the Center for American Progress has its way. They want the IPAB (Obamacare’s cost-cutting/rationing board) to have the power to impose cost-cutting “reforms” on private health-care plans.
Granted, restricting spending by health-care plans isn’t quite the same thing as restricting spending by individuals. But once you’ve established the principle that the government may control what people can pay for health care, it won’t take long for the tyrants to apply that principle to individuals as well.
POSTSCRIPT: Moreover, this is an instructive example of how statism works. Obamacare hasn’t even gone fully into effect yet, and the statists are already plotting how to take away the next piece of our freedom. The benchmarks can move breathtakingly quickly. What today is supposedly unimaginable (as Paul Krugman says about restricting private health-care spending) quickly becomes commonsense and only an evil conservative could argue against it.
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