This is a nice look at just how crazy our conservative friends are, and why we should never let them near a political office again. They're not only wrong, they sound out of their friggin' mind, with paralyzing fear:
N.Y. Times: “We are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program,” said one prominent critic of the new health care law. It is socialized medicine, he argued. If it stands, he said, “one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”-the critic was Ronald Reagan … almost 50 years ago … opposing government-run health insurance for the elderly.
Today, the supposed threat to free enterprise is a law that’s broader …
The federal income tax, a senator from New York said a century ago, might mean the end of “our distinctively American experiment of individual freedom.” Social Security was actually a plan “to Sovietize America,” a previous head of the Chamber of Commerce said in 1935. The minimum wage and mandated overtime pay were steps “in the direction of Communism, Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism,” the National Association of Manufacturers charged in 1938.
After Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation in 1954, 101 members of Congress signed a statement calling the ruling an instance of “naked judicial power” that would sow “chaos and confusion” and diminish American greatness. A decade later, The Wall Street Journal editorial board described civil rights marchers as “asking for trouble” and civil rights laws as being on “the outer edge of constitutionality, if not more.”
This year’s health care overhaul has now joined the list. On the most basic level, the law will ensure that people can get health insurance, and thus medical care, even if they are not insured by their employer or their spouse’s employer. Today, many can’t.
Judge Henry Hudson, of a Federal District Court in Virginia, ruled on Monday that Congress had overstepped by prohibiting a form of inactivity — that is, not buying insurance. And as Reagan did with Medicare, Judge Hudson argued that the mandate had a larger meaning: he said it “would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers.”
The law depends to a significant degree on the mandate. Without it, some healthy people will wait to buy coverage until they get sick — which, of course, is not an insurance system at all. It’s free-riding. Without the mandate, the cost of insurance in the individual market would rise, perhaps sharply, because some healthy people would not be paying their share. Just look at Massachusetts. In 1996, it barred insurers from setting rates based on a person’s health but did not mandate that individuals sign up for insurance. Premiums then spiked. Since the state added a mandate in 2006, more people have signed up, and premiums have dropped an average of 40 percent.
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