A Note on a Quote: Noemi Emery,  “They Had a Dream, “ Weekly Standard,  May 26, 2014

“They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects would cut through the clutter as mere mortals’ couldn’t. They would lift up the wretched, oppressed by cruel forces. Above all, they would counter the greed of the merchants, the limited views of the business community, and the ignorance of the conformist and dim middle class…

The Affordable Care Act looked for advice to academics, not governors, and proposed the state takeover of an industrial complex responsible for one-sixth of the gross national product based not on what had been proved to work through experience, but on what some intellectuals had guessed might work. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, this camel was a 2,801-page non-bestseller filled with labyrinthine riddles that nobody seemed to know how to solve. To insure approximately 18 million out of 300-plus million Americans (they confessed the plan would still leave 20 million uninsured), they proposed to spend trillions on a reengineering of the entire system that would in time cause 80 to 100 million of the currently insured to lose and to seek new insurance.”

Note :  The dream lives on.   Vermont has launched its own single payer scheme. “This is tough stuff,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, Socialist /Democrat -Vt., told a roundtable of advocates he convened in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “Single-payer health care bills – it ain’t going to take place here in Washington. I suspect it’s going to take place, as it did in Canada, with a state [Saskatchewan] going forward. I hope it will be my state.”  

As Winston Churchill remarked, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty- never give in.” If ObamaCare’s goal is single payer,  “never’” may  indeed be the case, if  current examples of single payer systems in other countries scramble to set up alternatives to their single payer systems  to satisfy their citizens, stay in power,  and make their budgetary ends meet. Singular single-minded single-payer sympathizers are retreating but still entreating their citizens to keep the faith in their infinite wisdom.