Forced Health Care Reform and the Subversion of Democratic Debate

Ready or not, here it comes: President Obama and the Democrats in Congress intend to completely change the health care system of the United States without any meaningful democratic debate. Rather than hold extensive hearings, allow a full airing of one of the most extensive and expensive changes in law in recent times—and risk having to compromise or lose—our overlords have decided they are going to shove what they want down our throats via a budget reconciliation bill. From the story :

Principals in the talks acknowledged that a tentative budget agreement reached Thursday night between Congressional leaders and the White House would provide for the use of an obscure procedure known as a reconciliation on a health care bill, allowing health care legislation that meets budget targets to be approved by a simple Senate majority. “It will be in there in some form,” said one top official engaged in the talks who did not want to be named since the final details of the agreement were still being worked out.

But Republicans have strongly condemned the prospect of using the arcane maneuver on an issue as important as health care and have threatened to use their own procedural weapons to bog down the Senate if Democrats plunge ahead. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, warned President Obama in a White House meeting on Thursday that the use of the procedural tool was likely to cause trouble in Congress. But Mr. Obama said that he backed the reconciliation approach to move ahead on health care, one of his legislative priorities, and did not want it to fail if 59 senators were on board rather than the 60 needed to break filibusters.

No, he doesn’t want the American people to have a say. We are going to have “reform” forced on us—like it or not. I don’t even think there have been committee hearings on all of this.

This is an utter corruption of the democratic process. Fundamentally changing our health care system isn’t a matter of the budget: It is the most profound and far reaching substantive policy change since Medicare. And we don’t even know what is in the bill! And neither will our representatives most of whom will once again be voting for important legislation they haven’t even read.

This end run around the legislative process confirms my fears that the political left is no longer concerned about freedom, it is about the exercise of raw power. And just wait until the details are worked out by the unelected bureaucracy. Can you say, “health care rationing?”