A Step at a Time for Liberals and Health Care

David Freddoso has a sharp piece today reminding us that the proposed expansion of S-CHIP government health insurance is really part of a long standing strategy by liberals to slowly push having the government be involved with everyone’s health care.

Democrats in Congress do not just want the government to cover the needy and uninsured. They want to legislate incrementally until they have established universal or near-universal taxpayer-funded coverage, beginning with children.

This is not the paranoid idea of a few conservatives, but a plan outlined in an April 9, 1993, memo from Hillary Clinton’s health-care task force. The memo, which became public later only thanks to lawsuits forcing sunshine rules on the task force, was previously mentioned in a Washington Times report ten years ago, when the SCHIP program was first created.

Universal coverage advocates don’t always come out and say this explicitly, but they’re not exactly shy about it either: Cato’s Michael Cannon caught American Prospect writer Ezra Klein making a similar claim just a few weeks ago.  From a strategic point of view, I’d say it’s a pretty sharp move.  By expanding slowly, those who favor government-run insurance will circumvent a lot of the debate over the costs and burdens of universal coverage. Instead debating sweeping plans, which (at least right now) are much less likely to pass, they’ll push for small additions to the government health-care rolls, and then paint anyone against the changes as "against health care" for whatever class they’re trying to cover at the time–children, lower class workers, etc.