Democratic Stealth Care
30th January 2009
Initially designed for children of working-poor families, this new Super-Schip will be double in size, and even kids whose parents make $65,000 a year will be eligible. The program will also now cover pregnant women and automatically enroll their new arrivals. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million individuals will drop their private coverage for the public program.
Under “stimulus,” Medicaid is now on offer not to just poor Americans, but Americans who have lost their jobs. And not just Americans who have lost their jobs, but their spouses and their children. And not Americans who recently lost their jobs, but those who lost jobs, say, early last year. And not just Americans who already lost their jobs, but those who will lose their jobs up to 2011. The federal government is graciously footing the whole bill. The legislation also forbids states to apply income tests in most cases.
January 30th, 2009 at 21:30
It’s important to note how most Democratic reforms seem to be aimed not at improving the welfare of the poor, but at expanding benefits upward so that middle and even upper class people can share them. These will be paid for by taxes also on the middle and upper class, leaving people mostly about as well off financially but with a much greater dependency on the government. Moreover you can expect the average American will not think this through well enough to realize they’ve gained nothing; they’ll simply think “Hey, swell! Barack Obama gave me free health care!” and vote Democratic for the rest of their lives.
The same is true of many other stimulus programs. Sure, they’ll create jobs: jobs whose existence is to some extent dependent on there being a Democratic machine in control of the government, thus creating a whole new class of people who work at phony government jobs whose existence is dependent on continually re-electing Democrats to all levels of government. They will pay ever increasing taxes happily, knowing that the higher the taxes go, the less likely the government will realize how useless their job is and send them back out on the streets.
January 30th, 2009 at 21:40
To be fair, and to answer the likely rebuttal, Republicans have been doing the same thing with the military for quite some time now. I’m not old enough to speak from experience, but I’d suspect the military in general wasn’t really partisan until Vietnam, but there and ever since it has been an overwhelmingly Republican institution.
January 31st, 2009 at 05:50
The distinction being that the military, like the police and the courts, is a core function of government, and health care isn’t. There is always a temptation to take money from the military budget and use it for other purposes, just as a family will constantly be tempted to use the rent money to go to Disneyland. But that way lies disaster.