ObamaCare is not about Health Care — by guest blogger Danny Lemieux

Given the many alternative health care reform options that have been proposed by conservatives, some Democrats, the health care industry and the insurance industry, why are they not even on the table for debate? There are government supported health insurance plans in other countries that work pretty well (Switzerland come to mind), but they aren’t being discussed. I would think that politicians reacting to declining poll support and upwelling protests against ObamaCare would be eager to explore middle ground. No such luck!

So, why is the Democrat “single-payer” (all claims to the contrary noted) proposal the only proposal being discussed as an all-or-nothing proposition?

British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan offered a very interesting insight on FOX News Network’s Glenn Beck Show recently when he warned that…the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is “the world’s 3rd largest employer.”

I did some research into this and found that the U.K. NHS service employs approximately 750,000 people, or about 1.3% of the U.K.’s population. Mind you, that’s not the whole health care industry because, unlike the Democrat Congress’s proposals, the U.K.’s public health sector does coexist with a private option. The U.K’s health system, public and private, employs about 122,000 physicians or about 2.0 physicians per 1,000 population. So, each U.K. physician employs about 5.5 additional national health care employees.

By comparison, the U.S.’s much maligned health care system provides about 2.75 physicians per 1,000 population, or almost half-again what the U.K. provides. ..for now, anyway. But, I digress.

Government bureaucracies are organic entities. They develop immortal lives of their own that are largely immune to constraint. I propose that is highly unlikely that any U.S. health care bureaucracy generated from ObamaCare would prove to be much different than a U.K. health care bureaucracy. I also propose that under the eventual government (single-payer) monopoly that ObamaCare is supposed to achieve, all health care workers will, de facto if not de jure, work for the government and that this will be irreversible.

So, what if the same ratio of government health care workers-to-population in the U.K. (population 61 million) was applied to the U.S. (population 307 million)?

This would translate into an additional 3.9 million jobs obligated to the U.S. government. This is a larger number than the total current employment of the U.S. government and Postal Service combined!

Think of all the opportunities: the numbers of additional employees voters totally beholden to government taxation and spending for their own welfare; unionization and union dues to be gained; job benefits to be granted; management sinecures to be awarded; public contracts to be granted; loyalists to be rewarded; special interest groups to be fleeced for donations, and union thugs to be mobilized to intimidate protesters. And all this over government control over an essential service, with the power over life and death, that can be given to or yanked away from a compliant population at will in the interests of political expediency.

Sound far-fetched? Not really. This is how things are done in Chicago, so the template has been proven and the machinery is well-oiled, in place and good to go. I can’t think of a more illustrative example of this world to come than Michelle Obama’s recent career history at the University of Chicago Hospital.

It’s something to think about!