Free to choose health care?

David Harsanyi:

If liberals are so disturbed by Congress' dictating whether abortion is a legitimate health care issue or not, it only makes sense that they should be equally troubled by government management of other health care decisions.

Undoubtedly, this is zealously naive thinking on my part. Reaching such a conclusion demands a modicum of consistency. And as we've seen, health care "reform" is an ideological crusade immune from logic.

Take the torrent of hypocrisy that spilled from the jilted pro-choice wing of the Democratic Party after a House amendment to the health care reform bill that would tighten a ban on federal funds for abortions passed by a vote of 240-194 -- a more substantial mandate against abortion funding, incidentally, than for health care reform.

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I have no doubt that members of the progressive wing of Congress -- folks who generally support a single-payer plan that would eradicate choice and freedom in health care -- believe that government's failing to give you something is indistinguishable from government's taking something away from you.

Yet even though no one would be stripped of her right to have an abortion under this legislation, the vast majority of citizens would have to deal with a cluster of new mandates and more than 100 new government bureaucracies to enforce them.

Citizens would be ordered to buy insurance or face jail time. Americans would answer to a "commissioner of health choices" and pay extra taxes for having the gall to buy top-of-the-line insurance plans. They no longer would have the right to choose health savings accounts or high-deductible plans or, in most cases, flexible spending accounts.

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The pro abortion representatives say they will vote against the final bill if the abortion restrictions are not removed. It is ironic that they may be our best hope of defeating this bill.