Never one to mince words, Peter Ferrara, a veteran of the Reagan White House, now at both the Institute for Policy Innovation and the American Civil Rights Union, takes apart the House Obamacare bill in the pages of American Spectator, labeling it, "The Absolutely Worst Bill Ever":
The bill is a serious threat not only to your freedom and prosperity, but to your very life as well.
That is because at the heart of this bill is a cruel perversion. The bill labors mightily (though it actually fails) to expand insurance coverage to everyone (taking the most expensive route possible). But then it is devoted to taking away the very health care that you may need to save your life, or the life of a loved one.
Ferrara, long a leading thinker on entitlement issues, including Medicare and Medicaid, always presents his arguments in a lawyerly style, but one of his points, in particular, stuck with me:
The left-wing extremists currently in complete control of Washington ... are wedded, emotionally and religiously, to outdated ideological crusades of 100 years ago.
That squares with our sense, here at SMS. The left is pushing a bill that celebrates a certain kind of politics, over everything--a politics of redistribution, not production. One can argue that there's a role for redistribution, but production must come first. You can't redistribute what doesn't exist.