Well, now that the election is over, the authoritarians (a/k/a liberals) can turn their full attention back to healthcare and resume the task of placing 315 million Americans under the thumb of the central government. Liberals are often seen as wanting to turn America into Europe, but that’s not fair to the Europeans:  even the E.U. doesn’t force a centralized healthcare system down the throats of the citizens of its member states; rather, the member states themselves handle healthcare separately from the central government. Wanting to go beyond the European model is a measure of how America’s liberals are losing their grip on reality.

The  legislation that established ObamaCare covered some 2,000 pages and will generate an unbelievable number of additional pages of regulations. Anyone who hasn’t read this stuff, however, need not bother because the direction America is going in healthcare can be summarized in three easy steps:  1) place everyone under the thumb of the central authority, 2) implement price controls on the various healthcare services, and 3) restrict access to such services. Any government can “control costs” with this formula; the question is what kind of system will we have in the end. With the liberals in charge, we probably shouldn’t expect much, and so perhaps the real question is how much damage will they inflict before all is said and done.

The central government already controls prices for much of the healthcare provided in this country (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid), and private insurers face de facto price controls in the form of rebates if their “medical loss ratio” (percentage of premium dollars spent on medical care) does not meet the minimum standards set by the government (Obama actually boasted about this policy during the presidential campaign). So it’s not surprising that liberals should now focus on restricting access, and sure enough, here comes the Washington Post with not one but two front page articles (here and here) that, in this instance, challenge the efficacy of mammograms.

According to the articles, recent research published in the New England Journal of Medi-cine shows that mammograms lead to overtreatment and do little to curb late-stage breast cancers. As this conveniently comes just as ObamaCare is gearing up, we see the liberals setting the stage to restrict access to mammograms. And of course, this is all presented as solid research. Indeed, in the first of the two articles, the writer made a point of explaining the study was paid for by the study authors’ universities. As if that places the conclusions beyond dispute –  case closed.

Of course, the writer didn’t disclose the ultimate source of the funding, which might very well have been the federal government. And the article contained nothing about the potential conflict for universities even if a study is not funded by the federal government:  a university that backs a study contradicting the liberal healthcare vision might put funding dollars at risk. After all, the Obama administration has already threatened to withhold funds from colleges that raise tuition. But the Post isn’t completely oblivious to objectivity and funding:  the day after the mammogram article, it published yet another front page story questioning the objectivity of studies funded by the drug industry. Yes, of course.

So we see how it works:  the liberals and their propagandists (maybe the Washington Post should change its name to Pravda once and for all and be done with it) working hard to restrict access to healthcare by 315 million people and at the same time demonizing the private aspects of the healthcare industry. How lovely.