No real surprises here. ObamaCare was designed to fail; even as the gullible saps in the Democrat electorate were told fairy tales about deficit reduction and “bending the cost curve down,” the socialist power brokers of the Left were promising more radical audiences that the whole thing was just a gateway drug to overcome American resistance to the hell of single-payer socialized medicine. (And accept no snake oil from anyone who says it isn’t hell. ObamaCare will bankrupt you, destroy insurance plans you like, and maybe get you fired or cut back to part-time hours. Single-payer socialized medicine will kill you.)
But here’s Harry Reid choosing a rather inauspicious moment to admit that single-payer total State control was the objective all along, as reported by the Las Vegas Sun:
Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past”
insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas
PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.”
“What we’ve done with
Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from
having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.
When
then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the
country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance
as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”
The
idea of introducing a single-payer national health care system to the
United States, or even just a public option, sent lawmakers into a tizzy
back in 2009, when Reid was negotiating the health care bill.
“We
had a real good run at the public option … don’t think we didn’t have a
tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system,” Reid
said on the PBS program, recalling how then-Sen. Joe Lieberman’s
opposition to the idea of a public option made them abandon the notion
and start from scratch.
Eventually, Reid decided the public option was unworkable.
“We had to get a majority of votes,” Reid said. “In fact, we had to get a little extra in the Senate, we have to get 60.”
So there you have it. The people of the United States retained enough vestigial independence to shoot down a dreary British-style single-payer nightmare in 2009. It was necessary to keep them bamboozled and confused long enough to get the ObamaCare train wreck chugging down the tracks. The people who created ObamaCare knew all along it wouldn’t work. If they thought it would fulfill any of its promises about reduced cost, improved benefits, increased availability, and so forth, they wouldn’t be talking about it as a stopgap solution until the real Cuban-style government-controlled wonder could be rolled out. There is absolutely no way to reconcile anything ObamaCare apologists have ever said in favor of the system – including everything Barack Obama said about it at his press conference on Friday – with what Harry Reid said here.
The thing to keep your eye on is the ObamaCare singularity: the public exchanges. That’s the rotten, malfunctioning, high-cost, low-choice, subsidized hell more and more Americans are tumbling helplessly into. That’s the pit every labor union in America, and the six-figure sultans of Congress, refuse to fall into. The public exchanges will turn into a deficit bomb powerful enough to cause all-out panic in Washington, as their cost soars four, five, and six hundred percent beyond anything the ObamaCare con artists estimated in 2010. That’s when they’ll come back and tell us that only absolute government control – the outright nationalization of one-seventh of the American economy – is the only possible solution.