Tom Harkin talks about the road to single-payer health care

I’d like to thank Senator Tom Harkin for being honest about the Democrat’s plan to ram a single-payer system down the throats of the American people. In a comment aimed at his progressive colleagues, Harkin compared the current Senate health care bill to building a house:

“What we are buying here is a modest home, not a mansion. What we are getting here is a starter home. It’s got a good foundation: 30 million Americans are covered. It’s got a good roof: A lot of protections from abuses by insurance companies. It’s got a lot of nice stuff in there for prevention and wellness. But, we can build additions as we go along in the future. It is a starter home. Think about it in that way,”

The Democrat’s ultimate plan should be rather obvious, but just in case you’re not too good with metaphors, here is Senator Harkin’s restatement of the idea above:

“At some point in the near future, and I don’t know exactly how long it is going to be, we are going to have some sort of a public option out there,” he said. “We might not get it in this bill, but it will come in as the years go by and as people begin to look at insurance companies and how much they are charging. I have no doubt in my mind that we are going to have to go to some kind of a public option, some type of a single-payer type system to bring the costs down. When the administrative costs of Medicare is somewhere around the 3 percent range, but the administrative costs of the private insurance companies are in the 15 percent range, there is a lot of money that can be saved by going to a better system such as a single-payer or a public option-type system.”

So, there you go. Sneak in a health care bill with no single-payer system, then gradually make changes which will increase government interference and make it more difficult for insurers to compete. That’s their plan of course, but things will change drastically if Republicans can regain control of the House and gain seats in the Senate in 2010.