Talking points

The socialists are coming! Or so Republicans would have you believe, said Philip Boffey in The New York Times. Every major Democratic candidate for president has now unveiled his or her plan for health-care reform, each of them including government-backed health insurance for the 47 million Americans who currently have none. The reform plans differ slightly in the details, but all would provide universal coverage and prohibit insurers from excluding people for pre-existing conditions or old age. None of them call for a single-payer, government-run health-care system. Yet the GOP candidates and conservative pundits immediately dismissed all three proposals as pernicious steps toward “European-style socialized medicine.” Well, what else are they going to say? said The Buffalo News in an editorial. If they were to drop the bizarre, McCarthy-era name-calling, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, et al., might be asked for the details of their own solutions to the health-care crisis, and on that topic these Republicans “have almost nothing to say.”

On the contrary, said Jonah Goldberg in USA Today. Both Giuliani and Romney have proposed tax deductions that would enable people to buy health insurance directly, instead of relying on employers or the government to give it to them. “People don’t want government-run health care,” and you would think Democrats—Hillary Clinton in particular—would have learned that lesson back in 1993. That’s when Bill Clinton put his wife in charge of a massive effort to overhaul the health-care system, and the resulting boondoggle—which was most definitely “socialist”—crashed and burned on arrival. Fourteen years later, she’s calling for universal, government-run health insurance rather than universal, government-run health care. But it amounts to the same thing: a lack of choice for the consumer, and an all-powerful federal bureaucracy in charge of it all.

If you’re really so adamantly opposed to government-provided health care, said syndicated columnist Bill Press, then you should demand the dismantling of Medicare—the vast federal bureaucracy that “successfully serves over 45 million seniors.” After that, you should take aim at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which every day provides “socialized medicine” to 8 million veterans and their families. Don’t stop there, said Diane Carman in The Denver Post. Congress enjoys universal health insurance that taxpayers pay for directly, and who could forget President George W. Bush, “a guy who enjoys round-the-clock federalized health care, including emergency roadside service whenever he falls off his bike?” It’s a lot easier to rant and rail against “socialized medicine,” apparently, when you’re already one of its beneficiaries.

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