To listen to the reports by the malpracticing media, health care lobbyists have volunteered, for the good of all, to pay for a large portion of the so-called health care reforms: “Representatives from hospitals, the insurance industry, medical device and pharmaceutical companies, labor and physicians came to the White House to discuss major steps being taken to lower health care costs across the board” by $2 trillion.

That’s the narrative coming from the White House and the cretinous press corp.

Yep, that’s how the “market” works: the president sweet talks “stakeholders” in an industry, and, before you know it, they’re cutting costs and improving delivery. And Meghan McCain will grow a brain.

“A good rule in politics,” explains Cato’s Michael Cannon, “is that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Lobbyists don’t simply propose to reduce their members’ incomes. If they did, they would be fired and replaced with different lobbyists.”

“According to the Urban Institute, covering the uninsured would cost a minimum of $120 billion per year. Over 10 years, the cost could easily hit $2 trillion.That money’s gotta come from somewhere. And that’s where politics comes in. Everybody wants that money to come from someone else.” …

“Another possibility is that the industry – which would get more customers under universal coverage – wants to help the president and Congress ignore the math.”

“Democrats have offered reforms that they claim would reduce health care spending over time, including more coordinated care, preventive care, and disease management. The industry endorsed those reforms in its recent letter to President Obama. But the number-crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office say there’s little to no evidence that those measures will produce savings. And unless the CBO agrees, Congress has to cut payments or raise taxes.”

“Senate Finance Committee chairman has spoken openly about getting the CBO to change its mind. If reformers can say that even the industry is committed to achieving savings with these reforms, that might make it easier to get the CBO to relent, and allow health care reform to pass without the necessary payment cuts or tax increases – even if there’s still no evidence that the assumed savings will appear.”

Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, doesn’t call it “cooking the books”; he calls it “the new math of universal coverage.”

Update I: Myron, last I checked, procuring private care in Canada was against the law. Socialized medicine—more often than not analyzed only from a utilitarian point of view—is coercion and tyranny that criminalize consensual, naturally licit contracts. If Obama is indeed building-up to Cuba-cum-Canada care by increments, it’ll end in coercion of the worst kind. Canada, North Korea and Cuba do not have second-tier medicine.

Update II (May 12): My man Myron again: In Canada, politicians jump the queue or hop over to the US. The rich and powerful are seldom without. Obama may be an operational centrist, but he’s all about heavy-duty planning. The guy can’t conceive of anything but a planned economy.

As bad as the Democrats are, let us not forget the quintessential con men and women: the Republicans. They’ve just about to compromise on a credit-card bill of rights. As you know, the right to carry debt with no penalty is enshrined in the Constitution.

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute details the Republicans’ contribution to socializing American health care:

“[A]lthough they claim to oppose the expansion of government interference in medicine, Republicans don’t, in fact, have a good track record of fighting it.

Indeed, Republicans have been responsible for major expansions of government health care programs: As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney oversaw the enactment of the nation’s first ‘universal coverage’ plan, initially estimated at $1.5 billion per year but already overrunning cost projections. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who pledged not to raise any new taxes, has just pushed through his own ‘universal coverage’ measure, projected to cost Californians more than $14 billion. And President Bush’s colossal prescription drug entitlement–expected to cost taxpayers more than $1.2 trillion over the next decade–was the largest expansion of government control over health care in 40 years.”

“The solution to this ongoing crisis,” writes Brook, “is to recognize that the very idea of a ‘right’ to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a ‘right’ to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services–no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a ‘right’ to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

So long as Republicans fail to challenge the concept of a ‘right’ to health care, their appeals to ‘market-based’ solutions are worse than empty words. They will continue to abet the Democrats’ expansion of government interference in medicine, right up to the dead end of a completely socialized system.

By contrast, the rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights would provide the moral basis for real and lasting solutions to our health care problems…”

[SNIP]

The Republicans—who, as I’ve joked quite seriously, need a giant tin-foil hat; not a bigger tent—have never made an argument from rights. I doubt they know what a negative individual right is.

With the exception of Meghaaan McCain and Carrie Prejean, of course.

Update III (May 13): LEONARD PEIKOFF is still the best at battling the enslavement of doctors.

Update IV (May 14): A correction to the low-ball guesstimates hereunder as to the amount of debt carried by each American: “Every American is now burdened, most of them unknowingly, with $184,000 in federal liabilities and unfunded government promises.”