Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it’s an assault on citizenship.
The essence of a government health care system – for people who have never lived under it and don’t know – is waiting, waiting, waiting. You wait for everything. You wait for years for operations that are routine in America.
We immigrants can sometimes sound a little hysterical about this because we come from places that have tried this and we know where it leads. Anybody who’s lived in countries with socialized health care knows that it becomes the dominant political issue.
The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it’s a permanent feature of life and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.