As conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to indicate that they have major problems with the new medical care bill’s individual mandate requiring all citizens to buy health insurance, an interesting question has come to the surface among some political pundits concerning the controversial law–was ObamaCare merely a clever ruse?
Apparently some political observers think so.
In an article today at American Thinker, Daren Jonescu articulates the point of view held by some that Obama and the Leftwing never actually wanted the individual mandate at all. The ultimate goal, says Jonescu, was a single payer system of healthcare, meaning that government would control the entire enchilata and medical insurance companies would be put out of business.
According to those who hold to this theory, Obama and the Democrats only put the individual mandate in the bill to entice Republicans to support it. Despite the fact that the notion of forcing citizens to make purchases is antithetical to the principles of conservatism, the mandate does, in fact, support private enterprise in that it would give insurance companies the central role in the implementation of the law.
All Americans, thus, in order to comply with the law, would be forced to buy a product from a private business–healthcare coverage. Such a thing, according to the thinking of Left leaning policy analysts and politicians, would be a major boost to the free enterprise system. Large corporations would suddenly gain even more power in modern American society.
The problem, however, is that most Republicans, with the exception of those like Mitt Romney, saw right through the reasoning of the Left and rejected the mandate as an attack on individual liberty, i.e., the freedom not to purchase something the consumer does not want.
Republicans were also troubled by ObamaCare’s drastic change of the meaning of the commerce clause in the Constitution, that merely because the federal government has the power to regulate commerce between the states does not mean it has the power to force citizens to enter a market, in this case, the health insurance market.
However, Obama and the Leftwing had to be well aware that these objections would be raised by conservatives. Most of those who formed the brain trust behind the ObamaCare bill are veteran political operatives in the Center for American Progress, the Tides Foundation, SEIU, and other such Left leaning organizations. These entities had to know, so goes the reasoning of those who adhere to the ruse theory, that ObamaCare had a very good chance of running into major roadblocks and even an eventual smack down by the Supreme Court.
And the notion floated out by the Obama Administration that there is no Plan B should ObamaCare be declared unconstitutional simply fails to pass the smell test.
There has always been a Plan B. Plan B, in fact, was originally Plan A. But according to the game plan implemented by the veterans of Leftwing politics, Plan B would be rolled out first. Plan A would be saved as the backup plan when Plan B failed.
Plan A, which waits in the wings should ObamaCare be declared unconstitutional, is to force insurance companies out of business and implement a complete government run healthcare system.
And not only will Plan A be rolled out if ObamaCare is declared unconstitutional, but it will be at the top of the agenda for an Obama second term, should he be reelected.
Even if somehow the Supreme Court decides to keep the individual mandate, many political observers believe that the Left will still not be satisfied. ObamaCare, according to most on the Left, is merely an intermediate plan along the road to a complete single payer system where there are no insurance companies and government controls the entire life of the individual citizen from birth to death.
Leftwing Democrats such as the late Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Tom Daschle, and a host of others who currently serve in Congress have always advocated for a purely Marxist healthcare system that is government owned and operated, European style. They still want such a system, but they believed that they had to approach the issue incrementally in order to gradually acclimate the public into accepting it.
In the early 1970s Ted Kennedy was advocating such a program. This reporter spoke personally at the time with a local Congressman who supported the concept, James R. Mann of South Carolina.
But the concept had a tough time gaining any support in the Congress or among the American people. The American Medical Association at the time was conservative enough to issue a public statement in opposition to ‘socialized medicine.’
President Richard Nixon at the time worked with Congress to propose universal healthcare coverage, but the bill failed when many such as Ted Kennedy opposed the plan because it did not go far enough toward a single payer system.
The idea was then placed on the shelf until it was resurrected in the early 1990s when ‘HillaryCare’ was proposed by the Clinton Administration. Again, there was such widespread opposition that the proposal was withdrawn.
That brings us to the present as some of the very same people who pushed socialized medicine in the 1970s and 1990s are doing it all over again, except this time they are much wiser in their approach. Instead of hitting the public head on with a program that scraps the free market system of healthcare for a socialized one, the brain trust of the Left decided to take the incremental approach, believing that an individual mandate that padded the pockets of private insurance companies would make the transition much more palatable.
But, according to Jonescu and others like him, no matter what happens at the Supreme Court, the belief of the Left that the American free market program of medical care must be changed to a Marxist system will not go away. The Left is too committed to the concept to allow it to die.
In the view of those in the Jonescu school of thought, the only way, thus, for American liberty to win the day over totalitarian control when it comes to healthcare is for citizens to remove Barack Obama from office in November and not only maintain the Republican majority in the House but take control of the Senate as well.
As long as the die hard proponents of a Marxist healthcare system remain in power, say the pundits, the monster is sure to rear its ugly head again in short order.
Notice! At my blog at The Liberty Sphere I present an in depth personal conservative manifesto delineating the acute danger America faces at this hour. It is a dire warning to the serious reader who loves freedom and the principles handed down to us by the Framers. Don’t miss it.
Visit my ministry site at Martin Christian Ministries.
Subscribe by clicking the links at the top of the page, or below, and you will receive free notifications of new articles plus a free newsletter.
A FREE, COMPREHENSIVE EDUCATION IN CONSERVATIVE POLITICS.
You will find it each week at WFHT-AM 1390 in Orlando-Avon Park, Florida, and on WKFL-AM 1170 in Bushnell, Florida, on the weekly program ‘A Voice for Freedom.’ Join Lori Hendry and Ginger Carlisle each Saturday morning from 11 AM to 12 Noon for interesting guests and news of vital importance to conservatives. Those living outside the station’s listening area can listen via the Internet.
Oh, and yours truly will provide a rundown of the top political stories of the week plus searing and insightful commentary from a conservative perspective.
