Republicans for Socialized Health Care

As Amy Ridenour points out at the National Center Blog, twarn't (as they used to say Down South) the Democrats we have to blame for the current push to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)--at least not wholly. It was Republicans who opened the door to this socialized medicine by passing SCHIP back in 1997.

Ridenour references a 1998 piece by Sue Blevins that tells the story.

How ironic. When the Democrats controlled Congress in 1993, the Clinton administration was unable to pass its national plan for socialized medicine. Yet with Republicans in charge of Congress, the administration was able to implement its backup plan. According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), previously secret documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton's Health Care Task Force show that a "kids first" strategy which could be implemented through Medicaid was the backup option in case the larger plan failed.

Blevins' piece tells us why Republicans did it and where the pressure came from. It's the same thing you see now, and the same emotional appeal liberals have been giving for a long time: do it for the children.

So why did the Republicans help create the largest federally funded health-entitlement program since 1965? It seems the Republicans merely caved into the Democrats' savvy political strategy, which went something like this: Let's propose a new government program for children and fund it with cigarette taxes. Then, if Republicans oppose "KidCare" we'll charge that they don't care about children and that the only reason they oppose it is because the Republicans get large sums of money from the tobacco industry. This was a brilliant political strategy.

This is why even relatively small incursions of socialism must be resisted. They are only the foot in the door to bigger things.

Conservatives must wake up and learn this if they are ever to bring our country back to greatness and greater freedom. Conservatism's greatest weakness is that it is, to a great extent, a somewhat passive philosophy. It seeks to hold and keep what it currently has, while liberalism is a philosophy on the march, not content to keep what it has but to take everything possible.

What conservatives fail to realize is that remaining besieged behind your castle wall is no way to win a war. Even if you manage to hold onto what you have (which is unlikely, with your resources diminished or cut off), you've done nothing to diminish the enemy's influence in the world at large. You can't win the ideological war while hiding behind your walls, trying to hold onto what you have. You have to be on the move, defeating enemies/arguments and taking new territory.

Another of the great strengths of liberalism is also its willingness to take small gains. This incremental strategy of inches ends up making more progress than the "all or nothing" strategy often embraced by conservatives. Gaining an inch is better than gaining nothing.

So conservatives take heed: know your enemy...and learn from him. Before you have nothing left to hold onto.