Enough Democrats will be horrified at the numbers and traps hidden in the legislation that if anything passes at all, it will be pretty much defanged.

The Left, which demands total government takeover, will be furious, and for the next ten years we will be hearing about how if only we had passed their fantasy legislation, we'd all be swimming in luxurious free medical and a balanced Federal budget.

If this were actually about medical care, and not about accumulating vast new powers to the Federal government, the entire issue would be that small percentage of Americans who can't get insurance, and they wouldn't be trying to drag all of us into a single monolithic program.

It's as though instead of creating a food stamp program, the government decided to nationalize the food industry.

You should probably skip the rest of this post.

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I will repeat a piece of information that single-payer advocates edit out of their minds the second they hear it:

Medicare is going broke. In fact, it is the single most lethal entity wrecking our future budgets, outweighing all other fiscal considerations including Social Security, defense, and the entire discretionary budget. Go look at the CBO report I linked to in the post above.

If government health care could be made cost effective and budget neutral, they would do it with Medicare. They either won't, or can't. If Medicare can't be made to work financially after all these years, how can it be done for eight times as many citizens?

If you want the rest of the story, almost every problem with our future budget stems from entitlements (again, see the report from the CBO, which has been repeating this information for many years). The rest of Federal spending is lost in the noise. Lost in the noise.

From a fiscal standpoint, the great social engineering programs that are the deepest foundations of liberal political thought are a massive failure. Small wonder they have to suppress this, and I get people here telling me the secret to balanced budgets are cutting defense, taxing CEOs, or ending the war in Iraq. When I gently point out where the decimal points in the numbers are, the steel shutters come down again.