Who's Really Peddling "Big Lie"?

The Big Lie is on the prowl in the health care debate. But who is guilty of employing it? According to the NJ Star-Ledger, it's the GOP. In its 3/9/10 editorial, entitled Health care reform scare: 'Takeover' claim is GOP's big lie, the Editors had this to say:

"Republican congressional and party leaders are pedaling as fast as they can to distance themselves from the Republican National Committee plan to drum up fear that the Democrats are driving America toward socialism.

"But in fact the GOP has been running that playbook for over a year now, portraying President Obama’s policies as radically left-wing, socialist — in effect, un-American. The most obvious example is the Big Lie about his health insurance reform plan, that it’s 'a government takeover of one-sixth of our nation’s economy.'

"First of all, the fact that health care is consuming one-sixth of our gross domestic product is a big problem and not an argument for letting things be. But no one remotely connected with the Obama administration is suggesting anything like a government takeover of medical care in America. Yet the defenders of the status quo conjure up a dystopian nightmare of 'Obamacare' with Soviet-style hospitals and drone-like doctors and with faceless bureaucrats deciding who gets care and who does not. (How they would be different from insurance company bureaucrats is a mystery.)"

Here is my commentary setting the record straight:

Posted by zemack
March 09, 2010, 10:03PM

The “Big Lie” is an appropriate topic for the Star-Ledger to editorialize on in regard to healthcare. But it’s not the Republicans that are employing it. It is the ObamaCare minions, including the Editors here, who are employing that tactic to its fullest. The real Big Lie is the claim that the only choice we have is between Obama’s “reform” scheme and the status quo. But “the defenders of the status quo” are not entirely accurate either. ObamaCare, the logical consequence of which really will eventually be “Soviet-style hospitals and drone-like doctors and with faceless bureaucrats deciding who gets care and who does not”, is not an outright takeover of healthcare. It is rather another step in the decades-long, slow-motion advance toward an eventual full takeover.

As I’ve been arguing here and elsewhere, the missing ingredients in the entire Left-framed debate is an examination of the role that the government has played in creating the problems healthcare “reform” is supposed to correct, and the third alternative – reinstitution of a free market in healthcare. Despite its strengths made possible by the remaining free market fragments, all of the problems attributed to American healthcare are consequences of prior government policies. The runaway costs and the problem of pre-existing conditions are government creations. Thanks to our government-imposed third-party-payer (employer-based) system, thousands of state-imposed community rating, guaranteed issue and benefits mandates, and legal trade barriers barring interstate competition, our “private” health insurance industry is actually a government controlled and protected series of state-based cartels which is more in the nature of fascism (back-door socialism) rather than any semblance of a market-based system.

The health insurance industry that ObamaCare supporters love to demonize is a scapegoat and a straw man, because it is in fact a political creation. The alleged power of the insurance companies is an extension of government power and would not be possible in a free market.

Of course, making a government takeover of American healthcare inevitable is what ObamaReform is all about, the Editors’ protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. But the Dems have cleverly avoided concrete specifics in their plan, giving cover for the Editors’ outrageously false claim that “no one remotely connected with the Obama administration is suggesting anything like a government takeover of medical care in America”. No. Instead, their plan contains the theoretical blueprint for future totalitarian control of every aspect of healthcare. What does anyone think a 2000 page document is full of? The trick is that the specifics will come later under powers granted to government officials, in the form of an unending tidal wave of coercive rules and regulations.

In an analysis of only a small part of one version of ObamaCare, the House’s HR3962, Professor John David Lewis cites numerous examples of this in his Objective Standard essay, which can be read in full in the Winter 2009/2010 issue. His conclusion:

“[The plan] will reach deeply into federal and state regulations and laws, on a scale that will require years for experts to interpret. It will establish institutions that will be effectively irreversible. It will grant arbitrary powers to bureaucrats, who will have to interpret and enforce its dictates.

“This legislation empowers the executive branch, namely the Secretary of Health and Human Services and a ‘Health Choices Commissioner,’ to write thousands of pages of regulations, and to force Americans to comply with them. For every line in this bill, many pages of regulations will be written.

“The central meaning of both is the repudiation of individual rights. No longer will Americans have the liberty to preserve their own lives in the way they judge best—from now on, they will have to conform to government controls on the most intimate details of their lives.”

The Big Lie is alive and well, and firmly ensconced in the Obama Whitehouse … and in the offices of the Star-Ledger Editorial Board.

And here are some supporting comments from docforfreedom, whom I drew attention to in my last post:

Posted by docforfreedom
March 10, 2010, 3:40PM

Well said, Zemack.

When trying to decide which is worse-- government or insurance company control of health care-- the answer is BOTH. We need freedom to choose for ourselves-- what health care to access directly and which insurance to buy for ourselves. The free market would keep both of these in line if the government weren't so busy meddling. The government ought not be providing any health care.

We can now access websites that can tell us where to obtain services at what price. Radiology groups are beginning to post cash prices. Why do we need a middleman for the majority of services?

We take our cars to our local auto repairman hoping that he can fix it. If there is something more complicated, he sends us to a specialist. Of course, with health care, the bills can run up very high, but THEN we need insurance-- NOT for the routine. Why involve a costly middleman when face to face cash payments would save everyone a lot?