TIPTON, Iowa - Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.Preventative health care? It is a very good idea. It would be wonderful if everyone had access to it. But making it mandatory? That's what separates well-intentioned wooly-headed liberalism from fascism. "This is so good for you, we're going to force you to get it!"
"It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."
He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat "the first trace of problem." Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.
Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.
The left needs to put its money where its mouth is. If George Soros, Peter Lewis, Barbra Streisand, Laurie David, John Kerry, John Edwards, and all the other progressive billionaires and multimillionaires think that there's a health care problem in this country caused by poverty, they are welcome to contribute 50% of their net worth to a fund to provide it for the poor. I don't think that it would be at all difficult for America's richest 1000 progressives to come up with a $100 billion endowment (that's only $100 million each). That much money would have no problem earning at least $6 billion a year in interest--and that would be sufficient to pay for $300 a month in health insurance coverage (an okay catastrophic coverage plan) for 1.6 million people a year.
That's only a small fraction of those who are currently uninsured, of course, but it's a start. And if America's billionaire liberals were prepared to dig deep into their own pockets--and perhaps spending a bit less time traveling around in their private jets--I think you would have no great difficulty getting a lot of other Americans to contribute anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to a worthy cause like that as a one-time contribution. But I think we all know that when America's billionaires start to whine about the need for the government to "take care of the poor"--as long as they don't have to spend any of their money--it's pretty clear that raising taxes is really about making sure that the rest of us slobs don't start to drive up the price of real estate in Sun Valley and Aspen.
Let's face the reality that billionaire progressives find painful: once you get above $10 million in assets, what do you do with it? Put $10 million in municipal bonds issued by your state of residence. You will earn about $450,000 a year, exempt from federal and state income taxes. That's $37,500 a month. You can't spend that much money in any sensible manner, except by buying a private jet, buying new cars every weekend, and never selling them. People that have net worths that exceed one billion dollars, unless they invest extremely poorly, should have monthly incomes of at least $3,750,000. And the best way that these obscenely rich people can spend their money is electing politicians who want to raise taxes on people that still have to work for a living?
I don't support confiscatory taxation. But if the billionaires insist on funding supposedly Robin Hood campaigners like John Edwards, I expect them to put their money where their mouths are. Instead, they seem more interested in taking money from those of us who still have to work for a living.
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