While Barack Obama runs for President on an ostensibly ”moderate” health care reform proposal, his accomplice Ted Kennedy is busy putting together the actual program they plan to shove down our throats:

From his sickbed, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has secretly been orchestrating meetings with lobbyists and lawmakers from both parties to craft legislation that would greet the new president with a plan to provide affordable medical coverage to all Americans, a measure he has called “the cause of my life.”

Obama claims he isn’t for a single-payer system, but he has made no attempt to discourage Kennedy from producing a piece of legislation calling for Medicare-for-all:

Mr. Kennedy is also moving with the knowledge of the presidential candidate who’s now leading in the polls, Sen. Barack Obama.

Here’s how this will come down if “the One” winds up in the White House. He will be presented with the Kennedy legislation in January. And he will sign it, throwing his own phony plan over the side. 

Obama will ask for a few changes just for CYA, but the plan we end up with will be just the sort of single-payer boondoggle he and his supporters claim he doesn’t want.

Then there will be the inevitable appeal an to public sympathy because Kennedy is going to kick the bucket soon, and this is likely to be his final hoorah in the Senate:

There will be a very strong impulse in the Congress to do things for him, especially things he really cares about, and health care would be at the top of that list.

There is no word, of course, on what Mary Jo Kopechne thinks of Kennedy’s plan.

I wonder how many state-level “universal coverage” plans have to crash and burn before the advocates of government-run health care figure out that they don’t work. The latest such plan to slam headlong into the laws of economics is The Keiki Care program in Hawaii:

Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

Why? Because, like all such programs, this one cost too much:

Gov. Linda Lingle’s administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. 

And, while failing to solve the uninsurance problem, the program crowded out private insurance:

A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

And Hawaii’s ill-considered plan, as Michael Cannon of Cato points out, has much in common with Obamacare: 

[Obama] would waste taxpayer dollars on people who can already afford coverage on their own.  He would draw millions into government health programs that would threaten their access to care.

If the voters are foolish enough to put Obama in the White House, and he colludes with a Democrat-controlled Congress to implement his health care plan, we will see exactly the same result on a national scale.

The laws of economics are stubborn things.

Phillip Klein points out an interesting development in the health care debate:

When it comes to health care, it’s actually conservatives who are offering change, and liberals who are offering more of the same failed policies (only on a much grander scale).

McCain’s health care plan calls for the elimination of the horribly inequitable and inefficient employer-based health insurance system. Obama, the ostensible progressive, is for sticking with the status quo:

The Obama campaign has taken to calling John McCain’s health-care plan “radical” and Barack Obama himself declared during Tuesday night’s debate that it would “lead to the unraveling of the employer-based health care system.”

If ever a system needed “unraveling” this is it:

The current system discriminates against those who seek to purchase their own health insurance, because it only offers a tax exemption for those who get insurance through their employers. As a result, many self-employed Americans cannot afford health insurance, even though their taxes help subsidize others.

McCain’s plan would go a long way toward fixing this situation:

McCain’s plan would make the system fairer by ending the tax exemption for health-care purchased through one’s employer and replacing it with tax credits of $2,500 for each individual and $5,000 for every family.

Meanwhile, Obama wants to exacerbate the problem:

Obama would not only maintain the current system of regulation, but he would implement onerous regulations at the national level.

I thought “progressives” were for, like, progress. Did I miss something? Is their progressivism just a social pose?

A trademark lie that has been consistently promoted by the Obama-Biden campaign is that  John McCain will tax everyone’s health care benefits. Joe Biden said it during the recent VP debate, and Barack Obama repeated it in tonight’s Presidential debate:

Now, Sen. McCain has a different kind of approach. He says that he’s going to give you a $5,000 tax credit. What he doesn’t tell you is that he is going to tax your employer-based health care benefits for the first time ever. 

This charge, like so many of the talking points that emerge from the Obama campaign, is pure fiction. When Biden told that whopper, the Washington Post gave him two Pinnocchios:

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the McCain proposals would result in a net benefit of $1,241 to the average taxpayer in 2009.

But the Obama campaign is apparently convinced that this “tax your benefits” whopper will scare some voters into his corner, so they keep repeating it.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Sarah Palin, and she made a good case for electing a real person to the office of VP. She also made it clear that she’s the only candidate in recent memory to have experienced the day-to-day health care travails of the average working person:

Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick.

But, unlike her opponent, she understands that more government meddling in the health care market is not the answer:

I support flexibility in government regulations that allow competition in health care that is needed, and is proven to be good for the consumer, which will drive down health care costs and reduce the need for government subsidies.

So, who are we to trust: someone who has actually been there or the hopelessly out-of-touch Joe Biden? In other words, do we need a real human being like Palin or a corrupt buffoon?

It will be interesting to see if Gwen Ifill, the moderator of tomorrow’s debate whose fawning book proves she’s in the tank for Obama, asks a question that gets anywhere near this basic issue.