We will soon shift from a market-based economy to a political one in which the government picks winners and losers and extends its reach and power in unprecedented ways. This shift is exemplified by the desire of Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress to push us toward government-run health care:
• For all his talk of allowing consumers to select their own health-care coverage, Obama's proposal, as he laid it out in his campaign, will provide strong financial incentives for employers to sign up with a new, Medicare-style government plan for their workers.
• This plan will almost certainly use a price-control system similar to the one in place for Medicare, allowing it to charge artificially low premiums by paying fees well below private rates.
• These low premiums will serve as a magnet for enrollment and will devastate the private companies trying to compete in the health-insurance market.
The result will be the nationalization of the health-care sector, which today accounts for 16 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
Nationalizing health care will put America on a glide path toward European-style socialism. We need only look to Great Britain and elsewhere to see the effects of socialized health care on the broader economy. Once a large number of citizens get their health care from the state, it dramatically alters their attachment to government.
Every time a tax cut is proposed, the guardians of the new medical-welfare state will argue that tax cuts would come at the expense of health care -- an argument that would resonate with middle-class families entirely dependent on the government for access to doctors and hospitals.
[I.e., it's how control is gained.]
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