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THE NATIONALIZATION OF YOUR BODY
Health care is a game-changer. The permanent game-changer. The pendulum will swing, and one day, despite their best efforts, the Republicans will return to power, and, in the right circumstances, the bailouts and cap-&-trade and Government Motors and much of the rest can be reversed. But the government annexation of health care will prove impossible to roll back. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the state and, once that transformation is effected, you can click your ruby slippers all you want but you’ll never get back to Kansas....

...But it will make a lot of other things worse. Government-directed health care is a profound assault on the concept of citizenship. It deforms national politics very quickly, and ensures that henceforth elections are always fought on the left’s terms. I find it hard to believe President Obama and his chums haven’t looked at Canada and Europe and concluded that health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. He doesn’t say that, of course. He says his objective is to “control costs”. Which is the one thing that won’t happen. Even now, health care costs rise far faster under Medicare than in the private sector. ...

...So elections dwindle down to a sterile argument over how to “improve” the system: The left-of-center party usually pledges to throw money at it. The right-of-center party is less enthusiastic about that, which generally makes it suspect on the issue, so it settles on some formulation to the effect that it can “deliver” better “services” more “efficiently”. In other words, the only viable rationale for the right becomes its claim to be able to run the leftist state more smoothly than the left. Every footling reform with any whiff of the private sector about it has the ranks of the great and the good lining up on TV to drone the indestructible cliché that “the NHS is the envy of the world.” Years ago, in The Daily Telegraph, I wrote that I’d seen a fair bit of the world and had never met anybody who envied the NHS, although presumably there must be a Bhutanese yak farmer up country somewhere who’d be impressed by it. A couple of days later, Mr Sonam Chhoki, a Bhutanese gentleman, wrote to the paper to say that, while not a yak farmer himself, he came from good yak farming stock and, after a bit of grumbling about my outmoded ethnic stereotyping, declared that he certainly didn’t envy the NHS. His British parents-in-law “have had to wait more than two years for operations, after being turned away several times for lack of hospital beds. However basic the Bhutanese health service is, it has not yet come to this sorry state.”...

...In a nanny state, big government becomes a kind of religion: the church as state. Tommy Douglas, the driving force between Canadian health care, tops polls of all-time greatest Canadians. In Britain, after the Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the US Fourth of July”, a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, and proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation....