The president needs to get something passed. Anything. The details don’t matter. Once it’s in place, health-care ‘reform’ can be re-reformed endlessly. Indeed, you’ll be surprised how little else we talk about. So, for example, public funding for abortions can be discarded now, and written in — as it surely will be by some judge — down the road. What matters is to ram it through, get it done, pass it now — in whatever form.

If this seems a perverse obsession for a nation with a weak economy, rising unemployment, and a war on two fronts, it has a very sound strategic logic behind it.

As I wrote in National Review a week or two back, health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. That’s its attraction for an ambitious president: It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists — to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs in every particular. [emphasis mine]

I hope Obama’s health-care bill does not pass, but I don’t want it to fail because the costs are insane — (the Congressional Budget Office estimates the proposed plan will cost over $1 trillion over the next five years). I don’t want any government plan for health care. I oppose state-run health care because it is a leftist power grab that comes from people who only want more power over others. The left has an insatiable and irrational desire to run everybody’s lives — from how much of your own money you can keep to what cigarettes you can smoke to what sodas you can drink. (Watch, they’ll be taxing soda soon.)

No, there is nothing at all magnanimous about the Democrats’ goal to “reform health care.” Their intentions are not noble. It is never noble to confiscate other people’s money or to declare that you have the right to other people’s money.

For exceptional analyses of the dangers of socialized medicine and why we need to oppose it, I refer you to www.WeStandFIRM.org — a site started by Paul Hsieh and some other Objectivist friends back in Colorado.