Convicted felon Robert Creamer, who wrote the blueprint for the Democrats’ health care reform campaign, attended official health care signing celebrations in Washington, D.C. yesterday. He was joined by numerous activists and “community organizers” who have had their sights set on nationalizing health care and have finally achieved it. Creamer’s spouse, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, was one of the bill’s most vociferous proponents.
Creamer’s attendance was leaked by a fellow partygoer who blogged: “I just got back from the post-signing ceremony celebration at the Interior Department. It was like a family reunion–young Obama staffers mixing with warriors from the ’93-’94 health care fight. I sat next to Bob Creamer, with whom I had been attending organizing meetings back to the early 1980s on passing national health reform.”
Let us leave aside for the moment the question of why federal departments are spending taxpayer dollars to throw parties celebrating the largest expansion of government in two generations, or why felons who failed to pay federal taxes are on the guest list. The real question is how America could have allowed itself to be led to this point, and what can be done to stop it from traveling further down the road to self-destruction.
Even from a sincere lefty point of view–if I can think myself back into the mindset of my teenage years–the bill is a travesty.
It subsidizes Big Pharma. It punishes the most vulnerable–the elderly and disabled–by cutting half a trillion dollars from Medicare and gutting home health care. It raises the costs of education by nationalizing the student loan market. And the benefits don’t begin for years, thanks to the bill’s accounting tricks.
But the real goal is more power, not better health care. The radical left has been trying to pass universal health care for decades before rising health care costs–party the result of government intervention–became a national issue. In 2006-7, Creamer, a political consultant with close White House ties, wrote a ten-point plan for passing the bill in a book he started while serving time in federal prison for check kiting and tax evasion. He explicitly intended his plan to be carried out in 2009.
Creamer’s intentions had nothing to do with increasing access to health care, lowering its cost or increasing its quality. As he stated in his book, Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win, health care was to be the first in a set of steps aimed at a radical redistribution of wealth and a massive increase in government control. He repeated this theme throughout the health care fight in his columns at the Huffington Post.
The second step he prescribed is sweeping immigration reform aimed at providing amnesty (and the vote) to millions of foreigners who are in the country illegally. And lo and behold, on the day the reconciliation bill passed the House of Representatives, a large pro-amnesty rally was held at the Washington Monument. Creamer promoted the rally on the Huffington Post, daring Republicans to oppose Democrats on the issue.
The White House and the Democrats in charge of Congress agree with Creamer that the health care bill leads the way to other radical changes. As Nancy Pelosi said in the days before the vote: “Once we kick through this door, there’ll be more legislation to follow.” If that proves true, it won’t be because Americans have become used to radical change, but because our elected officials have become used to ignoring us.