By R. E. Smith Jr.

  It’s time for all of us to be required to carry health insurance, according to the social planners among us. Or as one newspaper editor put it, "Democrats…say it’s time for every American to be covered one way or another." He writes that if the government doesn’t mandate insurance for everyone, we’ll all "be out of luck." Luck has nothing to do with new schemes promoted by Democrat presidential candidates Mrs. Bill Clinton and Mr. John Edwards. It’s another effort to carry us farther along the road to socialism. Republican candidates may have bought into the "47 million uninsured" propaganda, but they prefer to let the market work on this presumed problem and manipulate the tax code to change behavior with "tax credits."

  One thing about socialists, they never give up. The 1993 Clinton administration plan promoted by Mrs. Clinton and the press, went down like a baby hit with the flu once people recognized it as socialized medicine. As Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein wrote, that plan "regulated health insurance companies so heavily that it virtually converted them into public utilities." The fact that we have "public utilities" and other mostly regulated businesses gives evidence that America is flirting (now in the heavy petting stage) with socialism.

  Brownstein and other press apparatchiks are smitten. He hopes that now is the time for universal health insurance to succeed because of Mrs. Clinton’s "carefully constructed new initiative."—more honestly stated: her attempts to dupe us by making it sound less oppressive.

  But this plan will lead to suppressing competition, a goal of collectivists. "Collectivism" is the term used for government economic planning to achieve the goal of distributing wealth. Fundamentally, collectivism is the opposite of individualism. Individual decisions and actions, operating in economic freedom, gave us American innovation and prosperity. Collectivists can’t tolerate that.

  Beware when they tell you they only want to make competition work better; it can only work free of collectivist planning. These planners want to displace competition with their power to approve or disapprove individual business decisions. No matter how rational and good it sounds that will be the result. Brownstein writes that one "choice" in the Clinton plan "would be a government-run competitor to private insurance." It will be the worst one—and lead to more government control.

  This will be the beginning of deteriorating health care, more government spending and higher taxes in America. The president of the trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, says: "It’s a whole new game…." To be sure. And we will be the pawns in this first step in the grand scheme to bring us more tightly under government regulation and distribute our wealth according to political decree.