Guess who’s coming to dinner?

Someone named Noam N. Levey penned this wonderful little bit of misinformation in today’s LA Times:

Imagine the debate over healthcare legislation on Capitol Hill as a tussle among three friends out for dinner.

All three have been struggling to pay their bills lately. When the check arrives, they try to figure out how to divide it. The problem is no one can really afford the meal. And if one manages to pay less, the other two will go home even deeper in the hole.

That is the dilemma facing President Obama and his congressional allies as they try to develop healthcare legislation that can unite liberal and conservative Democrats and make it to the president’s desk by the end of the year.

“It is all a question of balancing,” said Ken Thorpe, a healthcare economist at Emory University who has advised congressional Democrats working on healthcare bills.

Think of our three friends as consumers, businesses and government, the three major groups that pay for healthcare in America.

The check is the nation’s healthcare tab, which now tops $2.5 trillion a year.

via Splitting healthcare tab is a balancing act — latimes.com.

Does Mr. Levey not realize that “government” pays for nothing? Every dollar spent by government must first come from a “consumer” or a “business” that created it in the first place.

Some might ask (and they’d be right in asking) why government needs to place itself in between citizens and their health care at all. Wouldn’t it all be more efficient to permit citizens and businesses who create their dollars to pay it directly to the insurance companies themselves? Wouldn’t it make sense to permit interstate competition between health insurance companies? Wouldn’t that competition (like competition between potato chip and motor oil companies) result in more choices for the consumers? Lower prices? Better quality? And wouldn’t it also make sense to permit consumers to purchase insurance against whatever type of contingencies they wish? Shouldn’t a healthy 22 year old male be free to insure against ONLY catastrophic occurrences? Why is he instead required to obtain and pay for a policy insuring things he doesn’t need?

Ah…and now we get to the reason for government. The reason that the government insists on insinuating itself between citizens and their health care is that without the government, the millions and millions of people who feel that they are entitled to FREE health care and who exist like CHILDREN within the soft fluffy womb of Big Government Insulation would be out of luck.

I’m not talking about people who despite their best efforts find themselves temporarily in need of assistance. I’m also not talking about the old, the young, the truly poor, the incapacitated. These people should be helped by the government and the government should be able to collect a little bit of money from the hundreds of millions of us who have some in order to help those who absolutely cannot help themselves.

But there are ALREADY government programs like that. Tremendously wasteful and inefficient ones, I grant you, but systems currently being funded that help the young (SCHIP), the old (MEDICARE) and the poor (MEDICAID). Not to mention social security.

Why isn’t “health care reform” focusing on fixing EXISTING programs to more effectively help those who are already eligible to receive that help?

Because that misses the point, doesn’t it? The object of the current Obama-liberal reform packages is to insure that the producers in this country are screwed to the highest possible degree so that those who are content to recline in the padded lap of government may do so from cradle to grave.

That’s why the various free market approaches that I outline above won’t be seriously entertained by any liberal. Because just as the Stimulus wasn’t created to stimulate anything except the liberal base, so too is health care ‘reform’ not intended to reform anything except capitalism.

The cure for capitalism is a heavy dose of socialism….and that’s just what Obama is planning to deliver.

If recent polls are any indicator though, these plans may be crumbling. Which of course is a good thing, despite what great thinkers like Noam N. Levey believe. The more Obama and his liberal cabal open their mouths to scold Americans on health care ‘reform’, the more we learn of his socialist mischief and the more sick and tired we become of his Presidency.

This chart from Rasmussen says it all:

Keep talking, Mr. President. Keep talking.