There's no difference of any importance between the House and Senate versions of "health care reform." The House bill openly considers doctors, patients and medical care the property of the government, and legislates accordingly. The Senate bill engages in the pretense that a private marketplace will still exist, knowing full well it cannot and will not, at least for long. The Senate bill outlaws the right of insurance companies to discriminate between the sick and the healthy, requiring insurance companies to cover everyone. This would be like a law refusing to allow a hotel owner to discriminate between those who will pay their bill and those who will not, requiring hotels to accept everyone regardless of ability (or willingness) to pay. Government, in theory, will pay the difference -- but there is not enough fiat paper currency that can be printed to pull this off.

The last best hope for American medicine is that doctors and patients will, at some crucial juncture, simply start over. We can only hope that they will go completely outside of the government-run system and defy what their rulers tell them to do. It would be the medical equivalent of a Boston Tea Party. Until or unless that happens, America is headed for the most expensive and mediocre "health care system" the world has ever seen. Think Canada and Britain on a grander scale. At least this time the most outspoken proponents of socialism and fascism who completely run Congress and the White House will get the blame.

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