AP:

For months, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has promised a plan to bring health care to every American.

She was to make good on that pledge Monday, unveiling a sweeping proposal requiring everyone to carry health insurance and offering federal subsidies to help reduce the cost of coverage.

With a price tag of about $110 billion per year, Clinton’s “American Health Choices Plan” represents her first major effort to achieve universal health coverage since 1994, when the plan she authored during her husband’s first term collapsed.

Free federally-provided coverage for the uninsured, mandated policies (paying for the former) for the rest of us, producing dramatically increased consumption of free medical services. Just imagine how much free health care the substance-abusing urban democrat constituent on welfare can consume. Result: federal regulation of physician charges, shortages and queues for the rest of us.

What a deal! The working American gets to pay for free health care for the bums, and then gets to stand in line right along with all the bums he’s paying for. When he finally gets to the head of the line, he will get exactly what the bum who didn’t pay anything gets. That end result will be significantly inferior health services than the American consumer gets now, because those services will need to be spread a lot thinner.

The most able and ambitious doctors will open unregulated clinics in the Caribbean, and the wealthy will fly off in their private jets for health care, while everyone else waits in line for his share of socialized and rationed services.

If Republicans succeed in explaining for a second time what socialized medicine really means, Hillary will be looking like this after the votes are counted.

James Lewis dissects the political description “Progressive,” a weasel-word commonly substituted for communist.

what kind of person has to label himself “Progressive?” Obviously somebody who believes he (or she) understands real progress better than the rest of us. Because if you are a Progressive it implies that everybody else, let’s face it, is a Regressive, or maybe just a Stagnant. It’s a smirky, self-flattering way of saying you’re a lot better than the rest.

So what kind of ego needs do you have to have to call yourself that? And what do you believe about others? In fact, Progressives must believe that other people are worse than they are; that only they can Save the Planet, or create Peace on Earth, or Solve Inequality, or whatever sin bedevils mankind.

Like the preacher who is focused on nothing but sin, Progressives must emphasize the alleged flaws of other people. They need to pinpoint those flaws, to feel important. Because Progressives make it clear that the real obstacle to Progress is Other People. In fact, if you really ask a “Progressive” what other people are like, you’re likely to hear that much of humanity is either ignorant or evil.

The word Progressive first became popular in the late 19th century, but has now been adopted as a popular synonym for “socialism.” Americans tend not to like socialism, associating it with the Soviet Union and other bad characters. But “Progressivism” sounds fine. So it is a euphemism for something people fear; a cover-up label.

The odd thing, of course, is that real progress in the world is almost never achieved by self-proclaimed “Progressives.” They generally make things worse rather than better. …

All of Political Correctness, the dominant cultural theme of the Left, depends upon.. allegations and accusations. It is incredibly shallow and superficial – but it is also very effective as a power-play. If you can put the world at a disadvantage by implicitly accusing them of sin, you can also manipulate and oppress others, conscious of your own moral superiority. Evidence is not required. It is the pervasive McCarthyism of the Left.

This kid is going get his health exam!

AP:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.” Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

“The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said.

Socialized medicine plus coerced health examinations, what could be more appealing!

At American Thinker, James Lewis has an essay on the fundamental similarity of all those noxious and irrational revolutionary ideologies spawned in the 19th century by representatives of the new class of cafe intellectual bohemians, what Russell Kirk liked to refer to as “spoiled priests.”

Everything must be different!” or “Alles muss anders sein!” was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart’s desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it’s true.

Read the whole thing.

The Scottish Daily Record reports:

Poor NHS treatment has led to almost half a million Scots dying in the last 30 years, a new study has revealed.

Doctors at Glasgow University found that between 1974 and 2003, a total of 462,000 people died in Scotland as a result of health service failings.

It means Scotland has one of the highest avoidable death rates in western Europe.

The study examined the number of deaths caused by a lack of “timely and effective health care”.

The vast majority of people – around 250,000 – who died due to inadequate or delayed treatment were heart or stroke patients.

Another 7300 had cancer and slightly more than 2000 were pneumonia patients.

The study revealed that avoidable deaths among men in Scotland over the time period was 176 for every 100,000 people.

This compared with 159 in Portugal, 129 in Austria and 100 in Italy.

Rates for women were 123 per 100,000, also higher than every other European country investigated.

The London Times reports:

Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt.

Under the plans published today, a fresh audit is to be conducted by the Government into the overall costs of alcohol abuse to society and the National Health Service.

“We want to target older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening,” a Whitehall source said. “They do not realise the damage they are doing to their health and that they risk developing liver disease. …

The move comes as The Times has been told that the British Medical Association is to investigate measures used in other countries to curb excessive alcohol consumption. Doctors’ leaders are also calling for pubs and restaurants to display warnings stating how many units of alcohol are contained in drinks served by the glass.

Today’s strategy, by the Home Office and the Department of Health, broadens the Government’s offensive against excessive drinking, with the focus moving beyond teenagers and the binge-drinkers to include those regularly sipping wine at home.

As part of the strategy, ministers wish to highlight the increasing burden that drink-related disease is placing on the NHS, which four years ago was estimated to be costing between £1.3 billion and £1.7 billion. Ministers want drunkenness in public to be as socially unacceptable in ten years’ time as smoking or drink-driving is today.

Last night Ian Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Physicians, gave his full support to the focus on the health costs of heavy drinking. “We really need the spotlight more on health. While crime and antisocial behaviour is important it’s too easy to concentrate on that because it’s somebody else causing the trouble.

“When you look at health it’s more uncomfortable because there’s a very significant percentage of the population already drinking at potentially hazardous levels.”

With alcohol costing 54 per cent less in real terms than in 1980, Professor Gilmore, a liver specialist, also called on the Chancellor to raise drink taxes.

Socialized medicine demonstrably involves the surrender of private liberty to the nanny state now in charge of paying your doctor bill.

The Telegraph has a story illustrated the price of free socialized health care.

Smokers could be denied routine operations on the NHS unless they quit a month before surgery.

At American Thinker, Noel Shepherd explains the fundamental necessity of Global Warming for the socialist left.

In the end, that indeed is what this is all about: Global warming represents the Democrats’ weapons of mass destruction. With it, they hope to scare enough Americans into sacrificing their own financial well-being all for the noble goal of saving the planet…

.. by cleverly claiming that seas are going to rise and begin killing innocent people in ten years if nothing is done to stop it, the liberals have created an urgency about global warming that the Bush administration failed to with Social Security. As a result, the population is now ripe for listening to solutions for a problem that is significantly more a figment of the imagination than the mathematical certainty that America’s largest entitlement program will go bankrupt if changes aren’t enacted.

Put another way, two years ago, the left and the media were able to convince the American people that there was no consensus about when Social Security would run out of money, and though they agreed it will certainly happen at some point, Americans were more than happy to defer concern for this seemingly distant problem. Yet, two years later, these same politicians and press representatives have created an hysteria over an unproven theory, professing a consensus that they advertise as incontrovertible even though none exists, all over a calamity that might never actually occur.

Isn’t that extraordinary?

Read the whole thing.