Suggesting that “virtually everyone [is] a collectivist when it comes to heath care” reform1, here is an exchange between former Republican now Democrat Senator Arlen Specter and a woman at a recent town hall meeting:
One woman prompted a standing ovation by telling Specter: “I don’t believe this is just health care. This is about the systematic dismantling of this country. … I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country. What are you going to do to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution?”
Specter responded by noting his support for the Constitution as a past chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on issues such as warrantless wiretaps.
“When you ask me to defend the Constitution, that’s what I’ve been doing,” Specter said.
Specter said that overhauling the health care system is about America taking care of all of its people.
“In our social contract, we have provisions that see to it that you take care of people who need some help,” he said.2
There’s that inauspicious phrase “social contract” used to describe the agreement between the rulers and those they rule written about in the post on Collectivism.
While it may be possible that elected officials like Mr. Specter are sincere in their intent to take care of society’s unfortunates, it is more likely that providing for the material wants of constituents only keeps the so-called “elected” in power. On this note, with some prescience J. Reuben Clark, Jr. wrote in 1943:
Before this war began, the Government had already entered the general insurance field with a Social Security plan, which covers unemployment compensation, Federal insurance contributions and benefits, and Federal old age and survivors insurance benefits. Other socialistic plans—such as socialized medicine—seem in the immediate offering. Thus the principle of Federal insurance of the individual is thoroughly established and working. It is not a long step from this to set up Federal life insurance. In the beginning, this Federal life insurance may be a side-by-side enterprise with existing private-company life insurance, mutual or others. But almost certainly the Government will, if present plans carry through, soon crowd down the regular life insurance companies, absorb their assets, and put their 67 million policyholders—half the entire population of the nation—on the public payrolls to be the wards of the Government. Thereafter life insurance will be one—perhaps the most important one—of the political shibboleths with which glib-lipped politicians of all parties will bid for votes.
It is not necessary here to argue the calamity which this could bring into our existing national financial, economic, and government life. To put 67 million citizens squarely behind any political nostrum would guarantee the continuance in power of its purveyors. I suppose further that no one would seriously deny that the taking over by the Government of the whole institution of life insurance would be one of the most important factors in establishing a communistic state.3
It is interesting that President Clark suggested that a public life insurance plan would exist “side-by-side” with private insurance plans until government took over the whole of it. According to the CNN story about Arlen Specter’s health care town hall meeting today:
Most Democrats want a public option to ensure coverage is available to virtually all Americans and provide competition to private insurers.
So the same government that regulates private insurance providers will now compete with those same private companies in order to provide “competition”?
Hum . . . I wonder who will win in the long run?
Sources:
- See Health Care Collectivists.
- “Specter Faces Hostile Audience at Health Care Forum”. CNN. 11 August 2009.
- Newquist, Jerreld L., ed. “The Welfare State – Creeping Socialism”. Prophets, Principles, and National Survival. Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1964. 364.
Related posts
Continue reading at the original source →