Laying the Groundwork for a Takeover

Writing for National Review, Mark Steyn offers an astute comparison of the health care bill signed into law in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney and the present, disastrous health care bill in Congress.

According to what he's [Romney] told at least a couple of NR audiences I've been among, he sought to solve a problem that doesn't exist — ie, that the uninsured are using emergency rooms as their family doctor, and supposedly the rest of the populace has to pick up the tab for that in increased health-care costs. In fact, ER use by the uninsured is in rough proportion to their percentage of the population, and the rest of the populace has to pick up a far greater tab for the under-reimbursement of doctors by Medicare. In other words, Mitt misdiagnosed the disease, and his prescription was a bigger dose of it:

The result is all the problems familiar to patients in socialized systems — longer wait times, fewer doctors, overstretched emergency rooms — with the uniquely American wrinkle of dramatically increased costs. Mass. residents now pay 27 percent more than the U.S. average...

The Massachusetts State Treasurer now says Masscare nationwide will bankrupt America. No doubt. But first it will drive out doctors and private insurers, providing the perfect pretext a half-decade down the road for politicians to step in and move to full-blown single-payer governmentalization. Obama wants that. So, from his point of view, Obamacare makes sense. Mitt presumably doesn't want that. So what was he thinking?