Hillarycare Making a Comeback?

This is frightening, the only solace I take is the fact that these polls have become tools for validating an agenda instead of framing one.

From Investors Business Daily:

Posted 12/5/2005
Medicine: Hillary Clinton's failed attempt as first lady to nationalize our health care system helped the GOP capture Congress 11 years ago. But HillaryCare is still likely to be a top priority for the next Democratic president.

Democratic Party consultants James Carville and Stan Greenberg recently announced results from a poll of more than 1,000 likely voters in which it was asked: "Do you feel our country would be better off or worse off today if we had passed the Clinton health care plan?" They were psyched by the response: "The verdict was not close: 53% better off and only 28% worse off."

Clearly, all these years after Hillary Clinton's secret health care task force went down in flames, a key goal for many Democrats remains nationalizing the 17% of GDP that health care is expected to encompass by 2011.

Does the survey mean Americans have forgotten the horrors they would have experienced under HillaryCare?

Sen. Clinton obviously thinks so. Abandoning the moderated, piecemeal approach she and other Democrats embraced since her task force's failure, she's called for "a new social contract" on health care.

In the summer, she paired with Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist on a health care Op-Ed in The Washington Post that was long on platitudes and short on specifics. And she's called for the government to standardize and manage the storing of medical research data and patient records, so as to make it all computer-accessible.

Democrats may be betting that if Americans can be convinced all the federal government would do in a nationalized health care system is act as an electronic records keeper, the next Democrat in the White House would have better luck than Bill and Hillary in getting a sweeping measure enacted.

Truth is , the Clinton White House tried to impose a health care dictatorship. You would have been stopped from going outside the system to buy basic coverage, or to get tests or treatment without government approval — even if you were willing to pay out-of-pocket.

In industrialized countries with socialized health systems, a month seldom goes by without a horror story coming to light.

Two weeks ago, Britain's Scotsman newspaper reported that "obese people in East Suffolk are to be refused hip and knee replacements, even if they are in terrible pain, as a result of health care rationing." The region's public health director called it mostly a financial decision, since he's dealing with a deficit exceeding $80 million.

America needs more control by patients — through innovative ideas like health savings accounts — to enhance choice, reduce waste and lower costs. We don't need government bureaucrats empowered to deny people open-heart surgery. That's the kind of outrage countries with national health care have tolerated for decades.