RochesterConservative.com

By Dale O’Leary
Newssun.com

The fight over ObamaCare reminds me of the story of the guard at a Soviet plant. Every night one worker would leave the plant pushing a wheel barrow full of dirt. The guard meticulously searched the dirt, but never found anything. After the fall of the communist regime, the guard saw the worker in coffee shop and asked “I know you had to be stealing something. Now we are both retired, tell me, what was it?”

The worker answered, “Wheelbarrows.”

It isn’t enough to shift through the details of the ObamaCare bill; we need to look at the delivery model.

I have spent my weekend reading through the massive health care bill. I must admit I haven’t read it all but what I have read was enough to convince me that this would be a disaster. It is not simply because individual elements are bad. It is bad because it will put in place a massive federal bureaucracy dedicated to overseeing every aspect of our lives. There will be government control everywhere.

Of course, pieces of it are particularly troubling. For example, on page 936 it calls for “Identification of health disparities in prevention and wellness.” And on page 973 it calls for “collection of data regarding the Nation’s health and performance of Nation’s health care,” by “race, ethnicity, primary language, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, … and any other population or subpopulation as determined appropriate by the Secretary.” We know what the government does with such data. Since it is statistically inevitable that they will find disparities, they will feel empowered to push for quotas and affirmative action. Such data will feed lawsuits.

The bill assures us that experts will be gathered to oversee and administer the whole thing, to decide on “best practices,” to improve prevention. The problem is that this will create a massive new entitlement program – not simply an entitlement for health care, but an entitlement for the government bureaucrats who run the program, who do the studies, who collect the data, who try to eliminate “disparities.”

We know from experience how difficult it is to fire a government worker or close a government program. Once these people get their hands into the public till they are not about to take them out. They will organize. Their unions will lobby for higher wages and more benefits. As sure as weeds grow, unions want to increase their power base by increasing the number of government employees.

All this will mean more money from the people’s pockets, more debt for the nation. The unions will fight any cuts – pretending to the public that every cut in their budgets is a cut in services to clients, when in fact real cuts would target superfluous workers and worthless programs. Government workers’ unions have the politicians under their thumbs and no cuts will be made. The programs will grow and grow. One has only to look at England, where the health care bureaucracy is now the third largest employer in the world after the Chinese Red Army and Indian railroad.

We who oppose this plan cannot allow ourselves to be fooled by small compromises or the elimination of the most offensive aspects of the program. Everyone needs to understand the way the far left works. First, they propose legislation that is a liberal wish list, hence the 1,000-plus pages. They throw every radical agenda item into the mix, knowing that the most extreme will draw fire. The most objectionable are almost always shot down, but in the process the opposition expends all its ammunition and the bulk of the radical agenda passes through unscathed.

What is worse, even if things like abortion funding are specifically prohibited, what is to prevent a judge from deciding later on that these must be included because once you grant a universal right to health care, you have no defense against other made-up rights?

ObamaCare is a Trojan horse. It may look like a gift, but break down the gates to let it into our city and our defenses will be irreparable destroyed. It is not enough to stop pieces of it or reform it, the whole idea of government health care must be rejected. We can’t afford it.

Dale O’Leary of Avon Park is a writer and lecturer and author of “The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality and One Man, One Woman.”