It is not easy to pinpoint when a society has officially moved from being predominantly a free market economy to predominantly a social market economy. That question is for a treatise, not a news annotation. But the lengths to which politicians in the state of Massachusetts are willing to go to "save" healthcare from their own disastrous policies is remarkable.

If only voters could refuse heroic measures like patients can.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved last night [November 3, 2005] a sweeping healthcare bill that promises to cover nearly all the state's 500,000 uninsured residents within three years. The House voted 131-22 for the legislation shortly before midnight, a few hours after rejecting a Republican-led effort to scuttle the bill's proposed payroll tax on businesses. [Source: The Boston Globe, November 4, 2005]

Welfare statism is not synonymous with socialism, yet consider the Bay State's maneuver to virtually one-up the socialist's own platform. Compulsory health insurance was not thought of by Marx or Engels, but in Massachusetts it may be piled upon other major interventions such as the state provision of old-age pensions, minimum wage laws, unemployment compensation, and free education for all children in public schools. Last week, by pronouncing this insurance mandate, democrat house speaker Salvator F. DiMasi aligned himself with a slightly more modern, 1930s-style national socialism—the tenet that it is the duty of the state to help raise the standard of the nation's health. At stake, he said, is the tradition of "bold and courageous leadership" in the Commonwealth. In other words, in the race to the bottom of today's government-overseen health care pit, don't let California outdo us.

Frighteningly, this is not a coup of the liberals. Conservatives facilitate these bills nationwide by the following approach: first concede the moral righteousness of state-ensured health, and then "stand firm" on some insignificant subsection clause. Governor Romney's "individual mandate" is the shabby solution made possible only by the immoral premise that the producers of care and medicine may not withhold or sell their product on their own terms. Promise everyone care first, goes the reasoning, and then we'll try to figure out who should pay for it later.

Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in the U.S. and co-founder of the ACLU, once said, "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." Comparatively speaking, those were better days. Now, statism in the health care arena is so accepted that words need not be euphamized. It's accepted and supported.

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