When it comes to health care, could there be anything more antithetical to the American ideal than Big Government being completely in charge? Actually, yes. It would be big government creating a system that requires private-sector entities whose interests inherently oppose to "come together" to form "partnerships" for the greater good.
Yesterday I wrote here about the way in which Hillary's plan forces all Americans, willing or not, to obtain health care insurance, and in an Orwellian twist calling it "choice."
More details about Hillary's plan emerge in Davd Brooks's New York Times column [still p.p.v., but free along with the other columnists as of Wednesday when Times Select goes the way of New Coke.]
Writes Brooks [emphasis added]:
[W]hen I spoke with Hillary Clinton yesterday, I asked what her newly unveiled plan revealed about her political philosophy.
The word she kept coming back to was “partnerships.” She described an array of different social entities — individuals, the federal government, insurance companies, doctors and hospitals — coming together and exercising shared responsibility for creating a better system.
It began to sound like a health care loya jirga — indicative of the political vision that has marked so much of her thinking over the years. When some politicians are asked to describe systems that really work, they think of the competitive marketplace. Others think of political combat — good defeating evil. But Clinton, at her most hopeful moments, is a communitarian. When she’s asked to describe a system that works, she describes diverse people coming together around a big table to reach a consensus.
Sounds like Hillary, on the one hand, is preaching "can't we all just get along?" On the other, you sense that when all is said and done, she expects all those sharing-and-caring communitarians to coalesce around her vision for the way things should be -- or else. In any case, as Brooks notes, Hillary's plan runs headlong into what "some politicians" [those that understand economics, human nature and the Constitution, I'd say] think should be the controlling force in health care: the competitive marketplace.
Brooks ends on a curious note, opining that Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is "better than the G.O.P. candidates’ plans (which don’t exist)." This from the Times' resident conservative columnist? Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm? Give me a good no-plan any day over one that subjects all Americans to the tender mercies of a Big Government here to help us.
