Astroturfing Health Care

FSP is shopping this on its front page in an effort to astroturf the creation of a socialist health care system:

Quite simply, with rising health care costs (including $50 billion per year to pay for insurance industry advertising) being born out by working families and American businesses, health care is a top economic concern. To keep American workers at their best, and to keep American business competitive in the world, something has to change.

Nancy Pelosi has recently declared health care expansion to be #2 on her list of legislative priorities, right after ending the Iraq war. In the past month, tens of thousands of Americans have told us they want quality, affordable health care for all. Now it's time to ask Congress.

So, Congress, which side are you on? Are you with us for quality, affordable health care for all? Or are you with the insurance companies, working to preserve our broken system?

We've set up a quick and easy way for you to contact your Members of Congress and ask them if they support our vision for health care reform. Just click here and enter in your phone number and address. Choose the elected official you want to talk to and in a few moments, we'll call your phone and connect you automatically.

Over the next few weeks, we want to make 100,000 calls to Congress, asking every Member which side they are on. We need your help to do it, so please click here to call!

I'm not really going to get into the idea of public health care, because there is a general consensus that it would be a disaster. But there are a few things that bother me with this, not the least of which is the fact that the author of the piece, Jason Rosenbaum, is employed by the Health Care for America Now group and Isaac chose not to point that out, which is disappointing.

What is not surprising, however, is the fact that the fringe left needs to try and create a groundswell of support for the issue of socialist health care. Because there is no support for it. The general public understands that when you have government run health care, you get government run solutions. The quality of care is diminished. The availability of care is diminished. Even the most important preventative procedures get a patient waitlisted and people resort to their own measures. Think of an HMO on steroids, and that's what the Democratic plan is.

Jon Henke wrote a piece for The Next Right yesterday afternoon that is very timely, given the left's attempt to further ruin American health care:

However, there are three problems with what Krugman claims about Medicare being "immensely popular"...

1. The recipients of Medicare get it, basically, for free. Since they're not paying for it at the point of purchase, it's not surprising that they think it's quite a nice thing.
2. Indeed, a lot of the real costs of Medicare lie in the future. And they are enormous. The costs are being hidden for now, while voters mostly approve of the more tangible benefits. Should voters ever have a chance to make a real cost/benefit trade-off, we'll see just how much they actually value it.
3. But, you might argue, polls show that 76% of Americans approve of Medicare. And so they do. But look what else those polls show about public approval of Medicare...

And that, my friends, is the problem. The most important plank of the Democrats plan is that it is a single-payer system available to everybody. But it is hard to create support for such a system when:

1. The costs of such a system would require draconian tax increases in an economy that cannot handle them;
2. The existing public health system already in place is one of the most reviled programs in government.

As usual, with the left it's about power, not about helping people, the same people who block affordable health care to the poor. The public would be best to ignore the health care solution the left wishes to manufacture support for.