This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by the child in every citizen
By Simon Maloy

One more hour to go, and Mark Steyn got it going by saying that national health coverage is just another excuse to regulate the lives of citizens, and is a symptom of the modern world. The real jump in life expectancy occurred in centuries past, said Steyn, when they began reducing child mortality, so the idea of annexing one-fifth of the economy for marginal benefits in life expectancy is ridiculous.

Then Steyn read from Robert Samuelson's Washington Post column this morning, in which Samuelson wrote: “Since 1960, government has changed radically. Then, 52 percent of federal spending went for defense, 26 percent for 'payments for individuals' -- the welfare state. By 2008, 61 percent consisted of 'payments for individuals,' 21 percent for defense.” Steyn said that between 1960 and now, our perspective on the role of government changed. It used to be that people understood that there were grown-up responsibilities, but now those responsibilities have been transferred to the state. We guess that transition started when the hippies invented irresponsibility in the '60s. Anyway, Steyn said the problem he has with socialized health care is that it changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. Look at Canada, he said -- elections became about health care, and the Health Ministry became the most important government arm. And, Steyn said, their programs wouldn't even be affordable if the United States wasn't paying for their national defense. We're effectively subsidizing Euro-Canadian health care, Steyn said, and if we going down the socialized-medicine route then it will worsen health care across the world because we won't have the funds to research diseases. Why, Steyn asked, if the American system is so bad, is it the world leader in medical technology?

The reason to oppose socialized health care, said Steyn, is that it is the biggest single factor in the “enervation of the citizens' self-reliance.” According to Steyn, when you accept that health care is too complicated for you to sort out on your own, you've effectively said that you're a child and you need the “government nanny” to do it for you. And once you start acting like a child, said Steyn, it's much easier for the government to control other aspects of your life. Steyn said you'd be surprised how easy it is to get free-born citizens to accept these sorts of things, and once you introduce routine government health care, it metastasizes and consumes private health care.

After the break, Steyn took a call from a gentleman who said that health care isn't like other goods (a topic we've touched on) because it is an inelastic market -- the market is the same wherever you go. As such, the caller said he'd like to see a single-payer system with a flat tax just for health care. Steyn said that the problem with a flat tax is that no matter what lever you set the tax at, it won't be enough to cover the costs because there is an inexhaustible demand. Steyn said he understood that health care does not have a normal market, but that's why he favors that it resemble a normal market as much as possible. Steyn said we have “chosen” to give ourselves a health care problem by allowing other parties to intercede between the doctor and the patient. It's complicated, Steyn said, because we're trying to design a health care system that will cover 300 million people with very different needs, and the government's control over that is huge. It's not possible to design a health care system for 300 million people, said Steyn, but designing your own health care program is very possible, and not leaving health care decision to the people will have disastrous consequences.

Another break, and Steyn was back with another caller who said that she'd recently chemotherapy for breast cancer, and while she was undergoing it she read that the U.K. had approved only two chemotherapy drugs for breast cancer, and she wouldn't have had access to the drug that killed her cancer had she been in the U.K. Steyn said she is a compelling reason for why people should be allowed to make their own decisions on health care. Steyn added that there is no free health care -- the government can only get money from you or, as Obama's doing, from your children on down the line. And there are costs of the socialized system that aren't factored in, said Steyn. When people have to wait at the doctor for hours, their employers lose money.

One more break and Steyn closed out the show with a pair of callers. After joking about Texas secession, Steyn's penultimate caller said she's retired and doesn't have a whole of money, but she nonetheless decided that she was going to spend all of her $250 stimulus check on good conservative causes to undermine Obama the “socialist twit.” Steyn said by her using her stimulus check as “anti-stimulus,” she's contributing in wrestling this monster to the ground.

Steyn's last caller said that Obama wants to implement socialized medicine, even though it's failed everywhere in the world, because he wants to government to have that money. Steyn said he's right, that money will go into the government's broad revenue stream, but it's also about the annexation of more and more areas of your life. Steyn said that if you believe in big government, you have to persuade the citizenry that big government is necessary, and to do that you have to arrange it so government plays a larger role in your life. We are in the situation, concluded Steyn, where basic aspects of your life are being annexed by the federal government, and that would have astonished anyone in William McKinley's day.

Thus ends another afternoon spent in the rhetorical clutches of Mark Steyn. The constant Uighur jokes were fairly rough, as were the repeated references to incontinence that we decided to leave out, but it might have been all worthwhile just to hear Steyn eat crow on his mockery of the “doughnut hole.” Or we could just be deluding ourselves again, a la raw tomatoes. Anyway, we'll be back tomorrow for Mark Davis' curtain call as EIB guest host. In the interim, we encourage you to check out our Limbaugh archives -- we're going to spend that time thinking up better gastronomical analogies.

Lauryn Bruck and Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.