The New Clarion

Robert Tracinski’s TIA Daily links to a column by Betsy McCaughey that reveals Tom Daschle’s attempt to socialize medicine in America by quietly slipping his plan into the “stimulus bill.”

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Daschle’s plan will bring about rationing on the UK model.

The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Daschle wants old people to just accept that they are old and die because the state cannot afford to give them proper medical care. This is monstrous, and it will very likely become law with most Americans never hearing of this provision.

Apparently, Daschle has been planning this subterfuge a long time.

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

An honest advocate of socialized medicine would have concluded from Hillary Clinton’s debacle in 1994 something like, “We must find a better plan so we can persuade Americans to support it.” Instead, Daschle concluded the answer is to sneak the provision through without debate or publicity by attaching it to another bill.

Daschle’s methodology is important to understand. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson writes,

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

(Italics added.)

Jefferson goes on to lay out America’s case clearly and forthrightly for all to examine. His goal was liberty and he used reason to persuade readers of his cause.

Tom Daschle’s goal is the opposite of liberty, and he uses the opposite method of Jefferson to achieve it. Daschle has contempt for reason. He hopes to use lies and stealth to destroy freedom in health care and grab power for the state.

Has there ever been a more dishonest — and yes, a more evil — bill than HR1, a .8 trillion dollar stimulus bill that will stimulate nothing but the power of the state?