{"id":22351,"date":"2013-09-30T09:28:49","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T14:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22351"},"modified":"2013-10-21T07:54:30","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T12:54:30","slug":"the-breathtaking-scale-of-obamacare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/30\/the-breathtaking-scale-of-obamacare\/","title":{"rendered":"The breathtaking scale of Obamacare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn<\/a> explains just how big the effective nationalization of the US healthcare system really is:<\/p>\n

No one has ever before attempted to devise a uniform health system for 300 million people \u2014 for the very good reason that it probably can\u2019t be done. Britain\u2019s National Health Service serves a population less than a fifth the size of America\u2019s and is the third-largest employer on the planet after the Indian National Railways and the Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army, the last of which is now largely funded by American taxpayers through interest payment on federal debt. A single-payer U.S. system would be bigger than Britain\u2019s NHS, India\u2019s railways, and China\u2019s army combined, at least in its bureaucracy. So, as in banking and housing and college tuition and so many other areas of endeavor, Washington is engaging in a kind of under-the-counter nationalization, in which the husk of a nominally private industry is conscripted to enforce government rules \u2014 and ruthlessly so, as Michelle Malkin and many others have discovered.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s pointless, traceless super-spending is now (as they used to say after 9\/11) \u201cthe new normal.\u201d Nancy Pelosi assured the nation last weekend that everything that can be cut has been cut and there are no more cuts to be made. And the disturbing thing is that, as a matter of practical politics, she may well be right. Many people still take my correspondent\u2019s view: If you have old money well managed, you can afford to be stupid \u2014 or afford the government\u2019s stupidity on your behalf. If you\u2019re a social-activist celebrity getting $20 million per movie, you can afford the government\u2019s stupidity. If you\u2019re a tenured professor or a unionized bureaucrat whose benefits were chiseled in stone two generations ago, you can afford it. If you\u2019ve got a wind farm and you\u2019re living large on government \u201cgreen energy\u201d investments, you can afford it. If you\u2019ve got the contract for signing up Obamaphone recipients, you can afford it.<\/p>\n

But out there beyond the islands of privilege most Americans don\u2019t have the same comfortably padded margin for error, and they\u2019re hunkering down. Obamacare is something new in American life: the creation of a massive bureaucracy charged with downsizing you \u2014 to a world of fewer doctors, higher premiums, lousier care, more debt, fewer jobs, smaller houses, smaller cars, smaller, fewer, less; a world where worse is the new normal. Would Americans, hitherto the most buoyant and expansive of people, really consent to live such shrunken lives? If so, mid-20th-century America and its assumptions of generational progress will be as lost to us as the Great Ziggurat of Ur was to 19th-century Mesopotamian date farmers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn explains just how big the effective nationalization of the US healthcare system really is: No one has ever before attempted to devise a uniform health system for 300 million people \u2014 for the very good reason that it probably can\u2019t be done. Britain\u2019s National Health Service serves a population less than a fifth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,66,13],"tags":[158,937,162],"class_list":["post-22351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-health-science","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-obamacare","tag-socializedmedicine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Ov","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22352,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22351\/revisions\/22352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}