The term “universal health care” is destined to take its place beside “collateral damage” as a modern masterpiece of euphemism. Just as the latter can be deployed without conjuring images of dead babies and demolished neighborhoods, the former can be used without evoking the specters of purgatorial waiting lists and obsolete technology.

As Peter Chowka points out today in the American Thinker, this euphemism is now de rigueur among evangelists of government-run health care. And they become very touchy when free market types decline to use it in the prescribed manner. Those of us with the temerity to conflate “universal health care” with socialized medicine are regularly upbraided for our effrontery.

A typical example of this can be found at Movin Meat, where the reprimand is couched as a “plea for clarity.” But “clarity” is precisely what the advocates of government-run health care don’t want. They want to keep the true face of socialized medicine behind a gauzy veil of euphemism until the American public has been successfully coaxed down the aisle.

Make no mistake about it. When the veil is finally pulled back, “universal health care” will possess all the warts that we associate with socialized medicine: bureaucratic mismanagement, substandard care, rationing, etc. Such blemishes disfigure all government-run health care systems—all of them.