This week the US House of Representatives stands poised to vote on a health care reform bill that will essentially socialize our health care system. At the risk of understatement, this is a very important week in our nation's history.

No one argues that America's $2.4 trillion health care system doesn't need to be reformed, but socializing America's health care system is a solution that will most certainly produce horrible results. The vision of a quality, efficient, and affordable single-payer public health care plan is nothing but a smokescreen for massive, centralized government control. Such a system, as I have oft repeated, does not work. I don't want a system where a committee, rather than my doctor, makes life and death decisions concerning drugs and treatment. I don't want a system where recipients are treated as supplicants, where you have no choice, where you must stand in line and be grateful for what you get. Like all government-run services, a government-run system will be wasteful and consume an inordinate percentage of wealth while delivering a lower quality of care. Who wants a hospital that is operated like your local BMV? And who wants their health care to be rationed by a Washington bureaucrat? Such bureaucrats want nothing more than to reduce you to a mere beggar, lining up in the ally for scraps, relying on them for even the most basic of human needs.

Look at what is already happening in Massachusetts, where their socialized health care plan has not only caused a $9 billion gap in the state budget, it has also led to rationing of care including one in five people who have been turned away by a doctor’s office or clinic. Socialized health care destroys wealth and lowers the quality of care. It has failed everywhere it has been attempted. Yet the liberal remains unalterably committed to it, for ultimately it is the holy grail of government control, for if you can control the most basic of human needs (health), you can completely control the human. As Mark Levin puts it:

Once the individual is entrapped, the Statist controls his fate. The individual will be seduced by the notion that he is receiving a benefit from the state when in reality the government is merely rationing benefits. The individual is tethered to the state, literally and utterly reliant on it for his health and survival. Not only does the government have an ownership interest in private property, but it also has one in the physical individual.

Socialized health care will spell the doom of this country. Federal entitlements have already set our trajectory towards complete national bankruptcy. Socialized health care will finish the job. The unfunded obligation to Medicare alone is estimated to be more than $30 trillion. Together with Social Security and Medicaid, these entitlements are projected to cause significant problems for the US economy. The CBO projections are staggering. They warn us that if these entitlement programs are left unchanged that by 2082 the tax rates for the lower, middle, and upper classes will reach 25%, 63%, and 88% respectively. The CBO concludes that "such tax rates would significantly reduce economic activity and would create serious problems with tax avoidance and tax evasion. Revenues will fall significantly short of the amount needed to finance the growth of spending; therefore, tax rates at such levels would probably not be economically feasible." In other words, we are presently headed toward disaster within one generation's time. If we go the route of single-payer socialized health care, we will accelerate and ensure the complete and catastrophic meltdown of the American economy and way of life.

It's not as though I, as a conservative, don't care about the health and well-being of American citizens. On the contrary, it is because of my love for this country that I will not stop opposing such disastrous legislation. Like the New Deal and Great Society programs before it, the promise of socialized health care is a pipe dream used for political purposes, one that caters to the ignorance of the entitlement-minded and will ultimately enslave us all to a lifetime of servitude.

But there is another way. We don't have to hand everything over to the Federal government (or, put another way, let the Federal government seize everything from us). Is it unreasonable for Americans to expect reform that gives families control of their own health care, provides greater tax relief, follows basic market principles of competition, and leaves the decision-making power to the States and not the Federal government? For the power-hungry Washington bureaucrat, yes, it is unreasonable for you to expect these things, for they run counter to their belief that they know better than you what is best for you and it threatens their control over your life. But there has to be another way than socializing the system. And the future of this country, literally, hangs in the balance.

Click here to email your elected officials and tell them you oppose this disastrous legislation.