The Dem long-term goal is complete government control of medical care, as in Canada. They make no bones about that.
Their House and Senate bills take a big step in that direction. They do it by mandating the purchase of medical insurance - and then regulating what your insurance must pay for. From what I can tell, they are not really mandating insurance at all - they are mandating that most or all of your medical bills get paid by the general population, depending on what government panels deem worthy of coverage for you (watch that process become immediately politicized).
Thus the need for the hefty tax increases and for an inevitable leap in insurance prices. That leap in prices, down the road, will, the Dems hope, lead to people crying for the government to jump in completely. That's always the plan: break something, then arrive on the scene to "fix it."
A wiser path - but one which would never lead to Canadian medicine - would have been to disconnect medical insurance from the workplace, to ensure portability, to create high-risk subsidized pools (as is done for high risk drivers in auto insurance) for those who cannot purchase insurance, to take down interstate barriers to insurance competition so that people have the choice to buy whatever sort they want, and to do some tort reform so that docs do not need to spend $40-200,000/yr on their insurance. Plus no mandate - it isn't American to force everybody to buy something if they do not want the product.
(As I have mentioned in the past, I like my family medical insurance. It is portable, cheap catastrophic insurance which cannot be canceled - and which would become illegal under the Dem plan. The Dem plan requires me to buy all sorts of junk I neither want nor need.)
Related: The healthcare backlash is coming. Or maybe it already has. People know that this thing is a dog...not to insult our canine friends.
Also, via Insty:
PETER WEHNER: The Health-Care Backlash. “This health-care bill may well be historic, but not in the way the president thinks. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like it: passage of a mammoth piece of legislation, hugely expensive and unpopular, on a strict party-line vote taken in a rush of panic because Democrats know that the more people see of ObamaCare, the less they like it.”
