Fighting ObamaCare: The Good News

The Senate Finance committee voted in favor of the Baucus-Obama Health Care Plan, dealing a significant blow to Obama's opponents, but opposition to the Democrats' health care takeover has only intensified:

Attacks on the leading Democratic reform plan this week by the insurance lobby left little doubt that two of the most powerful institutions involved in the debate — the White House and the nation's insurance companies — have abandoned any real hope of forging a compromise. What was a tenuous truce has turned quickly into an all-out battle, with both sides ratcheting up the hostilities.

The health insurance industry has finally recognized that in the long run, Obama is determined to destroy private health insurance. The industry faces two options: fight to win, or face certain extinction.

Let's also keep in mind that the Democrats still have enormous challenges to work out amongst themselves. Cato points out a very important fact: Democrats can’t expand health care coverage without taxing Democrats.

• Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is the biggest opponent of Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-MT) tax on expensive health plans because that tax would hit West Virginia coal miners.
• Unions vigorously oppose that tax because it would hit their members.
• Moderate Democrats in the House oppose Rep. Charlie Rangel’s (D-NY) supposed “millionaires surtax” because they know it would hit small businesses in their districts.

The real fighting has hardy begun, and yet public support for the Democrats' plans is already very weak.

Once the shooting starts, industry opposition will sway even Democratic members, because there are physicians and hospitals and employers and insurance-industry employees in every state and congressional district.

And in the battle over the new health care legislation, there's one more very important factor that has been almost completely overlooked: multiculturalism.

The communitarian ethos that upholds the welfare state is based substantially on ethnic trust and national commonality, and those bonds of affection and unity have a way of breaking down amidst multiculturalism. Welfare states thrive in homogenous countries, they are smaller and less expansive in heterogenous countries — and as for really heterogenous countries, well, they have a way of becoming ex-countries, viz. the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and so on.

The U.S. is a diverse, multi-faceted and multicultural society...and it has been so since the very beginning. The founders understood that their experiment with democracy would only work with a weak central government that allowed the states to function as independent laboratories of democratic diversity. We've departed from that original idea, but perhaps the push for centralized control of the health care system will show us that we can go no further.

Via Memeorandum

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