Health-care plan part of power grab

Recently, President Obama had this to say in an interview on CSPAN:

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we've made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we've seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades. So we've got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it's putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don't reduce long-term health-care inflation substantially, we can't get control of the deficit.

Under Obama we have done nothing to reduce our massive overseas military commitment or our ethanol subsidies or the thousands of other government programs that waste money. Instead, we've seen a massive "stimulus" passed that was loaded with awful pork barrel spending and Obama expanded Bush's terrible bailout for Wall Street/banking gamblers. But now we are supposed to "save" money with a vast increase in government-run health care.

He can call it what he wants, but what Obama is proposing is the same old socialized medicine we see in Canada and Great Britain. Costs there are "contained" by rationing as people wait months for routine medical care. U.S. hospitals near the Canadian border are full of desperate Canadians who pay extra to get medical care even our poor get under Medicare.

We can keep our fine health care and still save money if we go to Medical Vouchers. The time and expense of filling out government paperwork that balloons costs by 20-50 percent would be eliminated. We could then freeze payments for the next 10 years, let patients find the best care they can get and relieve our doctors of the biggest headache they have in dealing with the government.

Yes, Obama's health care program will just mean less health care for more money, but as we've seen in Canada and Great Britain, "free" health care is almost impossible to get rid of no matter how badly it works. We've seen Social Security defended to the death for decades despite it being a Ponzi scheme that will run out of money in the next few years. Obama knows socialism works politically even if it doesn't work economically in the long run. It's all about getting everything possible from auto companies to hospitals under his total control so all opposition will be crushed and he and his allies can have unchecked power for the foreseeable future.

Grant D. Noble

Lake Forest