I paint a stark, bleak picture of coverage provided under my authoritarian plan, but I yield to your point that I could not stand idly by as people – even people who are responsible for their own plight – were just dying in the streets. I may have a heart after all; I’ll be sure to let the wife know. Maybe we could just bus them to somewhere less public. Just kidding. Whatever care is given to those individuals, though, must carry with it a social stigma and shouldn’t be in any way desirable for regular folks. There has been too much emphasis on lessening the stigma on welfare recipients in general. I would prefer to still see them have to break out a sheet of food stamps in line at the grocery store, holding up the line as everyone stared and silently judged. They need that motivation to stop being supported by the fruits of my labor.

One reason I don’t want to see government health care is Medicaid. A relative was on Medicaid for a period of time and did not speak fondly of it. She suggested that we never use a doctor who accepts Medicaid – something I’ve also heard from other people. Well, last weekend we had to take two kids to the pediatrician and our doctor had the weekend off, so we had to go to a different doctor who trades on call weekends with our doctor. We had met him before in the hospital after one of the children was born – nice guy, seems competent. But going to his office was like visiting a third world country. The purpose of our visit was quite mundane (ear infections), but I felt like we needed to be sterilized and deloused after our visit. That’s what you get with a government run program that pays much less than private programs. Maybe I’m too elitist, but that isn’t what I want.

I understand the chilly Darwinian logic of not expending society’s resources on its least capable, or even its most luckless, members. I myself have been known to refer to the imbalance of public school spending on special ed as “pouring all your fertilizer on the stunted corn.” I am not suggesting that the government pay for bone marrow and organ transplants for every man, woman and child. Hell, dialysis is helping to bankrupt the Medicare system.

But I don’t like to contemplate a society where homeless schizophrenics are literally left to die in doorways, where uninsured women labor at home for two days to eventually deliver a stillborn baby, where (under your plan) poor Catholic kids die from diarrhea the way they do in the Third World, because they weren’t hospitalized because their parents wouldn’t sign on for mandatory birth control…I could go on, of course. I am not trying to make an emotional appeal, honestly. I just think the spectacle of all this being visited on the “least fit” of our citizens, of a wealthy, industrialized country ruthlessly cutting away its bottom layer like that…well, the word “demoralizing” comes to mind.

I’m not heartless, but I am rational. I really don’t have a problem with a government program to provide insurance for kids, provided that birth control for both parents is a pre-condition. No need to invite more burden on the system from people with a demonstrated incapacity to provide for their own.

I would support a well funded government program to provide all the necessities of life to individuals with illnesses or injuries so debilitating that they would be otherwise incapable of surviving and that the injury threshold is high enough that no one would cause themselves harm for a spot on the federal dole. I would like to see them given decent government jobs, however insignificant you or I might think they would be, that are respectful of their dignity – even if the job is grossly inefficient over alternatives. Regular employment is an important element of positive self worth; it gives you a reason to get up every day.

But I refuse to trade my liberty and independence for government health care based on hypothetical or anecdotal, isolated tales intended to tug at my emotions. I personally think Democrats do too much governing based on emotion rather than reality. And honestly, for a party that claims to cherish civil liberties how in the world can so many members be so eager to turn their lives over to the government – a government that could easily be run by someone you despise as much as Bush after Hillary/Obama/Edwards (assuming one of them wins)? It defies reasoning and is one of the ways that Republicans effectively portray Dems as only supportive of civil liberties when it comes to protecting the rights of criminals.

 Here are some of this morinings top stories:
AG Nominee:

Bowing to pressure from Democrats, President Bush has decided to name Michael B. Mukasey, a formal federal judge from New York to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, according to s…