Morning Bell: The Unprincipled Fight for Government-Run Health Care
Conn Carroll /
Last year, then-candidate Barack Obama told a rally in Albuquerque, “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.” Earlier this month in Chicago, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) told a rally of government-run health care supporters: “I know many of you here today are single payer advocates and so am I … and those of us who are pushing for a public health insurance don’t disagree with this goal. This is not a principled fight. This is a fight about strategy for getting there and I believe we will.”
The fact that the left views a public plan option as part of an unprincipled strategy to eventually achieve government-run health care is not news. That Members of Congress are now so openly admitting it, is. So what is the left’s “strategy” for turning a seemingly innocuous public health insurance option into single payer nationalized medicine? It goes something like this: