Big Brother wins

Feed the beast, and it grows into something that can no longer be controlled, because the beast now controls us. A seemingly well-meaning, small, almost benign intrusion metastasizes into a complete and monstrous takeover. That’s how it starts.

The indefatigable Senate Finance Committee passed a healthcare reform bill this week inviting — no — mandating government involvement in the most personal of personal matters: the health of each and every one of us. The Democrats on the Committee, with the help of Republican-with-a-very-small-R Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, passed a massive $829 billion bill that will be mashed together with a House bill establishing Big Brother government as the overseer, forcing (by law) nearly everyone to purchase health insurance — or else! The government will also steer your hand with, I’m sure, the gentlest of pressure, to the government option that is looking almost certain to end up in the final bill from the other Senate bills, the House side or the politically pernicious reconciliation trick up Democrats’ sleeve. (The Senate Finance Committee bill does not contain a public option, but establishes government-funded cooperatives — which is basically a government option with training wheels.) It’ll be cheaper for some of you because others will be paying your way with additional taxes that will hit the middle class hard, with a bit of help from grandma from cuts in Medicare she will be forced to endure.

This past summer, many warned the only way to make the Democrats’ healthcare legislation deficit-neutral was to cut services and increase taxes. That’s exactly what has happened with the new taxes and Medicare cuts imposed to make the bill pass muster with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The saddest and cruelest part of the story is that the middle class is being set up to bear the brunt of President Barack Obama’s and congressional Democrats’ insatiable lust for a political win on healthcare reform at all costs. This is what the concerned citizens who gathered at the August town hall meetings legitimately feared. But they were ridiculed by the media, castigated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in all of her full-blown faux outrage and called racists by former President Jimmy Carter. They lose. Big Brother wins.

The insurance companies have laid it out pretty clearly with the release of the PricewaterhouseCoopers study. A little bit of government control over healthcare requires even more government control over healthcare in order to make it all “work.” We will need to feed the beast and force everyone to buy health insurance (Big Brother will be watching you verrrrry closely on this one); otherwise, health insurance premiums will rise dramatically.

What seems to be missing from Democrats’ healthcare bills — literally all of them — is any sign of a hint of belief in capitalism or quality though private competition. It’s astonishing, really, to see how rapidly these basic tenets of American business and economic growth and freedom that have provided us with the best healthcare in the world have been abandoned by the far-left now controlling Washington.
America may be changing. But not for the better.

Jacobus, president of Capitol Strategies PR, has managed congressional campaigns, worked on Capitol Hill and is an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. She appears on CNN, MSNBC and FOX News as a GOP strategist.

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