“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

Find the cost of health care, buried in the bill.
Mother Debt will swallow you, swallow this blue pill.”–Crosby, Stills, Nash & Youngsters Not Yet Born Who Would Have To Pay For This Monstrosity

2,000 pages.

111 new bureaucracies.

3,425 uses of the word “shall”

Uncounted payoffs to unions, trial lawyers, the Illegal Alien Lobby, abortion corporations, etc.

And $1.2 Trillion. Yes–dollars.

If past performance is a guide (and what else is?), we can safely triple that figure to $3.6 Trillion. And that’s being “conservative”–many government programs cost 6 to 10 times more than “predicted”.

Few have really thought through the implications of that level of staggering debt. The government would have to confiscate our entire paychecks at some point, and we would be forced to stop funding the military.

Oh–maybe they did think it through.

I support helping poor people get health care. And there are various ways to do that. But I do not support making people poor, so that they will need help. And I certainly do not support the government confiscating one/sixth of the private economy and running it into the ground.

Food is a basic necessity, too. When people are hungry, we give them food stamps.

But we don’t have the government take over every farm, ranch, dairy, orchard, food processing plant, trucker, grocery store, fruit stand, farmer’s market, fishing boat, restaurant, culinary school, drink bottler, vending machine and cooking show. And tax rolling pins and frying pans.

Housing is also a necessity. But look what happened when the government tried to Socialize Mortgages through Freddie and Fannie, forcing banks to make bad loans in the name of fairness. Do you really think they’ll do better at Socializing Medicine?

Mona Charen:

My 16-year-old son, who has had Type I diabetes (an autoimmune disease distinct from Type II) since the age of nine, depends on a pump to live a reasonably normal life. But the recent progress in technology has offered really tantalizing possibilities. Medical-device manufacturers have recently debuted a new technology that is key to the health of Type I diabetics — continuous glucose monitors. Eventually, the combination of these two technologies could provide the Holy Grail for Type I diabetics: an artificial pancreas. We’ve heard estimates that the technology may become available within five years.

Unless the medical-device industry is hit with a major tax.

Which is exactly what Congress is proposing. It’s insane–trying to provide health care by taxing health care. All it will do is kill progress. Which kills people.

Hillary didn’t get her HillaCare passed. But she did get a tiny piece of it. She declared a crisis, called vaccine-makers greedy bastards who should be shut down over mere rumors, and passed a law that forced them to sell

at a forced discount of half price, then distribute it to doctors to deliver to the poor and the un- and under-insured.

The result is a cautionary tale for anyone who favors national health care. Already very high in 1993, childhood vaccination rates barely budged. A General Accounting Office report at the time noted that “vaccines are already free” for the truly needy through programs like Medicaid. Meanwhile, however, the Hillary project dealt the vaccine industry another financial body blow.

Thirty years ago, the Institute report notes, 25 companies produced vaccines for the U.S. market. Today only five remain, and a number of critical shots have only one producer.

They did exacily what you would do if someone cut your wages in half–they found other work. Now, almost all of our vaccines come from overseas.

So when you’re standing in line with your kids (behind prison inmates) hoping for a shot, thank Hillary and Socialized Medicine.

The cost of this proposed ObamaCare program is beyond anything ever seen in human history.

But even if it didn’t cost a dime, it would still be wrong.

Because it would cost us our freedom.

“A thing is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it.”

What are we willing to pay?