The clever propagandists who want to cement Obamacare in Idaho let slip via social media the dirty truth about what they’re really trying to accomplish with Proposition 2 on the November ballot. Sure, they want to expand Medicaid as President Barack Obama envisioned with his out-of-the-gate flawed and perpetually failing healthcare law.
But, contrary to the narrative being disseminated, the end goal isn’t to offer “free” health coverage to the estimated 62,000 Idahoans in the so-called Medicaid gap.
The real aim, revealed in a Facebook post, is Bernie Sanders-styled single-payer healthcare. Winning support for Obamacare Medicaid expansion in Idaho is just the launching pad for what the activists are really trying to accomplish. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is a waypoint on the path toward a socialist paradise where everyone’s healthcare is dictated by politicians and government bureaucrats.
Visit Reclaim Idaho’s Facebook page and see for yourself the August 28 post that urged activists to partake in “The Movement for Universal Healthcare.” Their words, not mine.
Below the "universal healthcare" remark sat a post that invited people to attend an event at the University of Idaho. Reclaim Idaho urged people to join their “humanitarian” movement for universal healthcare. By their own words, that movement will continue if Proposition 2 passes and becomes law.
Universal healthcare isn’t about making sure everyone has access to doctors and other medical practitioners. It’s about making sure someone else besides the patient pays for healthcare. It’s about absolving patients of personal responsibility, and it's about crowding out compassionate communities and individuals with cold, calculating politicians and government bureaucrats.
Reclaim Idaho’s clarity of purpose is helpful, because it opens the landscape to what’s to come next if the group and its out-of-state financial backers are successful in making thousands of able-bodied, childless adults dependent on Idaho’s government (read: taxpayers) for their healthcare. Today’s Obamacare proponents are tomorrow’s single-payer activists. They won’t be content to stop once Obamacare’s extension is firmly entrenched under Idaho law. Nor will the national groups like The Fairness Project, similarly engaged in a state-to-state battle for Medicaid expansion in Montana, Utah, Nebraska, and Maine, relent once the general election has come and gone. If they’re successful, they’ll keep up the effort until Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other socialists win.
Progressive activists in Idaho and nationwide will push for more and more and more, until one day—they hope, someday sooner than later—everyone is dependent on government programs, agencies, and edicts for their healthcare. In their perfect world, Americans won’t buy insurance with their own money and make their own healthcare decisions in concert with their own doctors. People will, presumably, pay nothing out of pocket, even if that means their costs will be borne by the masses through outrageously high taxes and a massive national debt to be paid by our kids and grandkids. Even if we have to endure long waits for substandard medical care like people in countries with government-run healthcare systems.
It goes without saying, our country’s healthcare system is a colossal mess. But that’s a mess caused by government, through years of marketplace manipulation and cronyism aided and abetted by politicians doing favors for hospitals, insurance companies, and medical system cartels.
The fix for the broken system requires less government, not more. Solutions to save Idahoans from the high costs of healthcare can be readily adopted. Which is why nothing would please socialists more than to see our conservative-leaning state, the last best hope for real solutions in healthcare, choose government programs over less government. They want to show that even conservatives in a Republican stronghold like Idaho are ready to give socialism a try. Idahoans would do well to pick the other path, the path to liberty.
