The economic impossibility of these programs was never a utopian concern. Although cost-cutting, price controls, and benefit denials are instituted haphazardly, there can be no retreat from the overall mission and the centralized control and planning of the masterminds. Instead, further consolidation is nearly always the answer. Centralized control over health-care decisions in particular has been a utopian priority from the earliest for it maximizes government authority over the individual.
In the Republic, only those who were otherwise healthy, but suffered either an injury or seasonal malady, were entitled to medical care. Those who were chronically ill, old, or infirm were of no benefit to the Ideal City and denied treatment (407d, 406b–c). In Utopia, magnificent hospitals were located near each city. “These hospitals be so well appointed, and with all things necessary to health so furnished … there is no sick person in all the city that had not rather lie there than at home in his house” (79). However, those who suffered from incurable diseases or fatal conditions were urged to kill themselves to alleviate their pain and their burden on society (107). In America, for more than one hundred years, the utopians have insisted on the institution of government-run universal health care, promoting it in egalitarian terms. It was among the “rights” listed in Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Every person, he argued, has “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”
in 2009, with Barack Obama as president and a supermajority Democratic Congress, the utopian counterrevolution reached a new pinnacle, for there were no legislative obstacles and few remaining constitutional impediments to stop or even slow its advance. The utopians seized the opportunity they had long craved to centralize and consolidate control over the entire health-care system. Late on March 22, 2010, despite much arm-twisting, deal-making, and secret negotiating, the Democratic-controlled House barely passed the nearly three-thousand-page-long “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) by a margin of 219 to 212. As with the initial adoption of Social Security and Medicare, there was no great clamor for the PPACA when it was adopted. Indeed, it was opposed by the public. A few days before its passage, Gallup found that “more Americans believe the new legislation will make things worse rather than better for the U.S. as a whole, as well as for them personally,” and its latest poll was “consistent with previous Gallup polls showing a slight negative tilt when Americans are asked if they support the new plan.”69 Most in Congress who voted for the bill had not read it, not only because of its length and complexity, but because the final version had not been made available to them, or the public, until shortly before it was voted on in the House. As intended, its concealment prevented critical scrutiny of its particulars. As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, just a few weeks prior to the vote, told the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.…”70
Meanwhile, like Roosevelt and Johnson, Obama used deception and manipulation in hopes of rallying popular support from the very individuals whose sovereignty he sought to control. During the health-care debate, Obama claimed that “no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”73 However, McKinsey and Company’s “early-2011 survey of more than 1,300 employers across industries, geographies, and employer sizes, as well as other proprietary research, found that … 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering [health care] in the years after 2014,” once the PPACA has been fully implemented.74 Obama insisted that “the underlying argument … has to be addressed, and that is people’s concern that if we are reforming the health care system to make it more efficient, which I think we have to do, the concern is that somehow that will mean rationing of care, right? That somehow some government bureaucrat out there saying, well, you can’t have this test or you can’t have this procedure because some bean-counter decides that is not a good way to use health care dollars.…”75 He went on, “So, I just want to be very clear about this.… You will have not only the care you need, but also the care that right now is being denied to you [by insurance companies]—only if we get health care reform.”76
Obama argued that health-care reform “will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” He declared, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficit, now or in the future, period.” However, Hewitt Associates and Mercer both reported that the PPACA was contributing to premium hikes;78 the Congressional Budget Office disclosed that it will cost 800,000 jobs;79 it reported further that the program will likely cost $115 billion more than originally estimated;80 and the secretary of Health and Human Services admitted that $500 billion in supposed savings resulted from double-counting funds cut from the Medicare program.81
Obama said in 2008, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
However, more than a year after its passage, and before 2014, when its most onerous provisions kick in, the PPACA remains unpopular with the American people.84 But rather than be deterred, the utopian masterminds are moving fast to institutionalize the law in the administrative state, making it much more difficult to disentangle should they lose control of the elected branches in subsequent election cycles. More than $100 billion was secreted into the bill to fund its start-up, bypassing the usual congressional appropriations process.85
An analysis by Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute revealed that the PPACA establishes more than “150 new bureaucracies, agencies, boards, commissions and programs” that “are empowered to tell doctors and hospitals what is quality health care and what is not, what are best practices in medicine, how their medical practices should be structured, and what they will be paid and when.”
Yet the most pernicious aspect of the PPACA has nothing to do with health care per se. Specifically, the statute dictates that an individual who does not have health insurance but who can afford it must purchase a private health insurance policy, whether he wants to or not, or face federal fines and penalties.
But there is nothing in the history of the nation, let alone the history of the Constitution and the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress or any part of the federal government to regulate inactivity and compel an individual to enter into commerce—that is, to enter into a legally binding private contract against the individual’s will and interests simply because the individual is living and breathing.
“Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”
Lost Ferry 