Blocking Obama's Health Plan Key to GOP's Survival
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by Sheldon Rampton
Michael F. Cannon, a pundit at the libertarian Cato Institute, has written a blog post that highlights what….will be one of the most important issues in play once Barack Obama assumes the U.S. presidency. “Blocking Obama's health plan,” he writes, is “key to the GOP's survival.”
Cannon's big fear… has been haunting conservatives in the United States for more than a decade. They worry that a universal government health plan, if it should ever come to pass, will be so wildly popular with the public that they will reward Democrats for passing it. The same fear was expressed in 1997 by Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who famously declared that his goal is to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
In an interview with the libertarian Reason magazine, Norquist said that he was motivated in the early 1990s to organize his conservative coalition by “sheer terror of Clinton's health-care plan…. Had the Democrats taken over health care, I think we would have become a social democracy and we could have never undone it.”
This is a point on which conservatives have good reason to worry. The public already believes, by a strong majority, in government-funded universal health care. As the Gallup polling service reported last year, “69% of the public believes it is the federal government's responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage. What may be surprising is that many of the nation's small-business owners – known for their fierce independence and entrepreneurship – not only believe that the current U.S. healthcare system needs a complete overall, but also support the idea of a taxpayer-funded national health insurance program.”
Conservative pundits like Cannon, in league with the private U.S. healthcare industry, have spent vast sums of money to discredit the idea of a publicly-funded healthcare system for the United States. The healthcare industry has been campaigning against what it calls “socialized medicine” since the days of Harry S. Truman.
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