Goldwater Institute: Clinton's new health care proposal is as intrusive as the 1993 version

Clinton Care 2.0

by Clint Bolick

Largely lost amidst attention over Super Tuesday was Sen. Hillary Clinton's admission on Sunday that her proposed universal health care program would come with a huge dose of government coercion.

Hillary Clinton reported that Clinton said she would achieve universal coverage by "going after people's wages" and "automatic enrollment."  The healthy must support the sick, the senator insists, and must be forced to join a government health insurance program willingly or not.

Ironically, liberals who are fighting for government-compelled health care are risking a principle they worked very hard to establish in the law.  The U.S. Supreme Court decisions recognizing the right to have an abortion rest in large measure upon the intimate relationship between patients and their physicians, a relationship upon which the government may not lightly intrude. In their zeal, they would have the federal government decide a matter presently left to individual choice.
       
All of this underscores the importance of efforts by two Arizona physicians, Eric Novack and Jeff Singer, to place a state constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would prohibit the government from interfering with individual decisions regarding health insurance.  Should Clinton Care 2.0 pass at the national level, the measure would set off a major federalism battle.
In the meantime, the face of the nanny state has never been so vivid.  Americans surely want access to affordable health insurance, but not by coercion or compulsion.

Clint Bolick is the director of the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.