A Stitch in Haste

I'm too drained after my last post to give John Edwards' outrageous, terrifying and patently un-American (un-Two-American?) proposal to establish health care totalitarianism — in the form of compulsory preventive care — the proper critique that it so obviously deserves.

So I will settle for posting this comment I left on another blog:

There is a fundamental and self-apparent difference between Medicaid and universal health care: Medicaid is not universal — it is welfare. It is those who don't benefit from it paying for those who do. So there is of course a basis — perhaps a heartless one, but a basis nonetheless — for attaching strings to Medicaid eligibility that do not carry over to bona fide universal health care (including Medicare).

Socialized medicine (including Medicare) is different from Medicaid: it is taxing people to fund a compulsory universal scheme, then saying that because the health care is "free" (!), the government can attach strings on the very people who (involuntarily) paid for the coverage in the first place.

So the government takes my money, and then demands that I conform to its (i.e., politicians' and bureaucrats') standards of "correct" lifestyle choices in order to get my money back. All in the name of establishing a "compassionate" and "enlightened" paradigm.

This is what I have previously dubbed "The Krugman Lie."

The era of Big Government is what?

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More thoughts from Liberty Papers, PoliBlog, Cato@Liberty.