If Teddy Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer 30 months ago instead of 15, and if he had been successful imposing an Obama-care-type government health care reform—with its free-market, free-choice defeating “public option”—earlier in his career, as he had been trying to do for more than 30 years, then President Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois.
It was Senator Kennedy’s forceful (nearly strident) introduction and support of the novice senator at the beginning of the 2008 Presidential election cycle that vaulted Obama from footnote to first place in Iowa and beyond.
Unfortunately (or not, depending on your political viewpoint), had Mr. Kennedy been a more successful senator, and had had his way with nationalized health care, he would not have been around to help jump start the Illinois upstart.
As per the rules of the game under nationalized medicine (as in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other countries), complicated and expensive treatments of the kind administered to Mr. Kennedy in the last 15 months would not have been available to someone his age—and in the case of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, perhaps not available to anyone of any age.
It is through rationing, committees, and across the board cost-cutting that the health services in all of these nationalized countries—all of which are running deficits in the billions of dollars—prevent running deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars.
This assumes that U.S. senators would not receive extra special care—despite their age—that would not be available to the ordinary tax payer, the very people who work hard to pay for the salaries and extra-special care for government employees. Such a system would be similar to what we saw in the heyday of the Soviet Union, where citizens received an average level of care, and senior party members and their families and friends received an above-average level of care.
Fortunately for Barack Obama, no such system was in place at the beginning of the last Presidential election cycle; Mr. Kennedy became ill 15 months ago, not 30; and the senator from Massachusetts had easy access to the world’s finest medical care—a pool of talent and state-of-the-art resources that, despite considerable government meddling and interference, grew out of an imperfect, rag-tag collection of free-market, free-choice, mostly profit-oriented options.
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