Socialism: Clinton’s Health Care Legacy

by | Feb 5, 2000 | POLITICS

Bill Clinton is not leaving quietly, certainly not when it comes to health care. In a Presidential and Congressional election year and in a cultural climate where the public has been “educated” to believe that health care is an entitlement, Clinton is again resurrecting the left’s insatiable desire to complete the destruction of medicine. To […]

Bill Clinton is not leaving quietly, certainly not when it comes to health care. In a Presidential and Congressional election year and in a cultural climate where the public has been “educated” to believe that health care is an entitlement, Clinton is again resurrecting the left’s insatiable desire to complete the destruction of medicine. To do so, he is again relying on the conservatives’ compromising pragmatism and altruism.

In his final year in office, Clinton outlined his latest plan for the assault on medicine. The key elements of his plan are:

  • A $3000 “tax credit” for individuals to purchase long term health care
  • A $76 billion dollar proposal to “insure” the parents of children who receive “free” health care under the state’s “Children Health Insurance Program (CHIPS)”
  • A second attempt at vastly expanding Medicare benefits to individuals when they reach the age of 55, rather than 65 under current Medicare law

Clinton’s “rationale” for greatly expanding health care benefits to those parents who receive “free” health care benefits for their children under CHIPS is that “It’s hard to have healthy children without healthy parents.”

Hard for whom to do what for whose children?

It is “hard” for an individual who has abdicated responsibility for the health care of his own children to take responsibility for his own life. In Clinton’s view, it is therefore easier to simply extort wealth from producers to pay for the medical “needs” of irresponsible parents.

As has become the usual modus operandi of the left over the past several years, Clinton is again packaging elements of coercion with freedom. His proposal to extend a $3000 tax credit will appeal to many quasi-rational individuals, especially many pragmatic conservatives, since it means less money is being extorted by the government in the form of taxes. The proposal to extend health insurance coverage to parents who have chosen not to take responsibility for their children’s’ health care and to vastly expand Medicare by lowering the retirement age by 10 years is evil — it vastly increases coercion in the health care market and sacrifices the productive to the non-productive.

The so-called “new left” here in America and the “new social democrats” in Europe share a common political strategy — garden variety altruism and package-dealing elements of brute force with freedom. They have learned very well that in any “compromise” between freedom and force, only death can win.

Richard Parker is a practicing emergency physician. He holds a BA from Brown and MD from Yale University, has published in the scientific/professional literature and has written Op-eds for the Ayn Rand Institute and Capitalism Magazine. He is owner and moderator of www.OActiveAtlas.com, a philosophical discussion forum.

The views expressed above represent those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors and publishers of Capitalism Magazine. Capitalism Magazine sometimes publishes articles we disagree with because we think the article provides information, or a contrasting point of view, that may be of value to our readers.

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