Health care ‘reform’

Like any huge government program, Medicaid -- the program that rations "free" tax-paid medical care to the poor -- doesn't work as well as Democrats hoped when they rammed it through Congress as a memorial to the martyred John F. Kennedy a half-century ago.

The largest problem: It costs many times more than originally estimated. But Americans tolerate Medicaid because providing basic care to the poor seems the decent thing to do.

Guess what? President Kennedy's surviving brother, the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has a new health care plan. The plan is to take any family of four that earns less than $110,250 a year ... and put them on Medicaid.

That's right. The plan that's tolerated because it's just for the poor and it's better than nothing? Sen. Kennedy and the Democrats now say if your family earns less than $110,250, you're going to need it.

By the way, remember candidate Barack Obama's promise, last year, to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs? Maybe he meant jobs for new Medicaid clerks. Because the Kennedy plan would "require every American to have insurance and would mandate that employers contribute to workers' coverage," The Washington Post reported this week.

Loading new costs onto struggling employers during the worst economic downturn since the Carter Administration (if not the Great Depression) -- costs that go up with every new employee. Oh, we can see Mr. and Mrs. Pizza Shop Owner rushing out to hire some strolling musicians and an extra waitress, right now.

Not that new laws requiring employers to pay more will ever be enough. Even the Democrats realize that. So they have bigger ideas. Like a national sales tax.

At a White House conference earlier this year on the government's budget problems, a roomful of tax experts pleaded with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to consider a VAT, or "value added tax," The Post reported last Wednesday. "A recent flurry of books and papers on the subject is attracting genuine, if furtive, interest in Congress. And last month, after wrestling with the White House over the massive deficits projected under Obama's policies, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee declared that a VAT should be part of the debate."

Leonard Burman, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, who testified on Capitol Hill last month about his own VAT scheme, complained, "It's common to the rest of the world, and we don't have it."

Kind of like beriberi, malaria and teenage soldiers with machine guns on all the trains?

Mr. Burman suggests that a 25 percent VAT could pay for health care reform, balance the federal budget and exempt millions of families earning less than $100,000 per year from the income tax.

There's that number again. The "rich" -- families earning more than $100,000 or so -- would pay for everything, apparently, and the 90 percent of American families earning less than $100,000 would get free health care, and never have to pay the income tax again! Yay!

Two small reality checks: When the federal personal income tax was introduced in 1913, sponsors said no one but millionaires would have to pay it -- ever. And in 1991, Connecticut introduced a state income tax to "replace" the "regressive" state sales tax. Every year since 1991, Connecticut has had both a state income tax and a state sales tax, which now stands only two percentage points lower than it did in 1990.

Sen. Kennedy's office says Democrats could start "marking up" the bill by June 16.

Whether it was intended that way or not, there was one piece of good news on this front out of the White House last week.

"If we don't get it done this year, we're not going to get it done," President Obama said last Thursday in a call to members of Organizing for America, the political group formed to advance his agenda, as he urged them to organize a giant push to promote European-style socialized medicine on these shores.

The president may be right. In 1917, the Bolsheviks promised everything would be fine once they seized the wealth from the wealthy and "spread it around." By 1921, there were no more "wealthy" to loot, and people were boiling their shoes for soup.

Hustles and scams tend to have limited lifetimes. Massive tax-and-spend plans launched during deep recessions are particularly susceptible. Diversions will soon be needed.

On the third night, as the townspeople filed into the theater with their bags of rotten fruit to lie in wait for the Duke and the Dauphin, little did they know that the hucksters were already on their way out of town.