Freedom Line Blog

No, the munchkins didn’t proclaim this, but the liberal Huffington Post did.

The supposedly good news (for Republicans, libertarians, Whigs, patients, taxpayers and moderate Democrats who like their current office space) was reported today by Ryan Grim.  He noted sarcastically, “The public health insurance option died on Thursday, December 10, 2009, after a months-long struggle with Senate parliamentary procedure.  The time of death was recorded as 11:12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.”

Apparently Nancy Pelosi read the political tea leaves and noticed that voters simply won’t tolerate a government-run public option.  When questioned, it took Pelosi about two-hundred words to essentially say that the House would accept the Senate “compromise” to drop the public option in exchange for lowering the eligibility age for Medicare enrollment.

But make no mistake.  This is no cause for celebration.

Some Democrats are actually excited, hoping that expanding an already financially strapped Medicare system will pave the way for a true single-payer socialized system.  Indeed, as Brian Faughnan of RedState.com noted earlier today, the idea is actually the brain child of Howard Dean, who proposed a similar plan during his 2004 presidential bid.   And why is Dean, who is a strong proponent of a single-payer system and has been critical of his fellow Democrats for not going far enough in their efforts to put the government in charge of your health care, supportive of this so-called compromise?  As Faughnan writes:

The reason Dean likes this compromise – the reason he proposed this compromise – is that he would rather have the government bureaucracy in charge of people’s health care plans than private insurance companies. That’s one point of view. Some may agree with it; others not. But it seems the real value of this proposal to Dean is that it ‘moves the ball’ toward a single-payer health care system.”