What you learn early in life is that nothing comes free, and if it does, it's probably crap anyway. Yet, people insist on upholding free-isms as some kind of salvation from the pre-WWII order. Unsurprisingly, they're often dead wrong. Take the ObamaCare for instance, which is everything but "free":

The $1 trillion number doesn’t even tickle the meter, and that’s a big problem for Democrats. They argue that the reforms will save a trillion dollars, making ObamaCare deficit-neutral over ten years, but none of the plans come in under that price. Just to move 30% net of the uninsured onto health plans will take more that $300 billion above that ceiling, making it an addition to an already astronomical deficit pattern.

What exactly does $4 trillion and a public plan buy us, besides even higher deficits over the next ten years? A “medium” level of generosity for the Silver plan, with an “average” level of access to physicians and hospitals. On top of that, the plan still underpays providers with even the 10% boost over Medicare payments, which no one is suggesting will remain permanent. And that will only still cover “nearly everyone,” a measure Dr. Parente doesn’t explain in his statement.

In other words, almost a third of all covered Americans would get thrown out of their current plans and onto government-paid care.

$4 trillion of dazzling debt and the beginning of the end for the private health care sector? That is starting to sound like European-modeled socialism to me. I know, because I live in one of the most tax-burdened and socialist nations in the whole of Europe. Although Obama claims he's not trying to implement our system, let's review some of the negative consequences of systems close to the one he has in mind:

In Britain, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, public health systems have become political punching bags for opposition parties, costs have skyrocketed and in some cases, patients have needlessly suffered and died.

"I would warn Americans that once the government gets its nose into health care, it's hard to stop the dangerous effects later," said Valentin Petkantchin, of the Institut Economique Molinari in France. He said many private providers have been pushed out, forcing a dependence on an overstretched public system.

"The minute you make health insurance mandatory, people start overusing it," said Dr. Alphonse Crespo, an orthopedic surgeon and research director at Switzerland's Institut Constant de Rebecque. "If I have a cold, I might go see a doctor because I am already paying a health insurance premium."

All of this really goes down to the inherent problems with socialism: although a pleasant idea (?), it usually doesn't work out in the end, because:

(1) It speeds up costs, raises taxes and slowly turns everyone, including the productive middle class, into welfare-addicts.

(2) It generates insane amounts of bureaucracy that handle most issues very poorly.

(3) It reduces individual freedom for the sake of government-sponsored cohesion, effectively replacing social community culture with carrot-stick incentives like lobbying and entertainment.

(4) It reduces individual creativity and innovation within most fields of culture, science and business.

(5) During economic meltdowns, the quality of state-run services drop drastically, slowly wiping out the middle class.

Sweden has currently got a high-quality health care system, but what's the point of having it if it only lasts for a few generations? Signs are already awash that we don't have any money left to finance it, and patients suffer because there's nowhere else to go (only the rich can afford advanced operations at private clinics). The system is slowly collapsing in under its own weight, despite these insane tax rates:

A system like that cannot be sustained by a people going through a severe demographic change, which is why Europe is hot for immigration, illegal or legal. It knows it cannot finance that health care empire unless there are young people bringing in taxes. Unfortunately for Europe, the assimilation record is dangerously unimpressive, and the system keeps growing more and more expensive along with the rest of the state-run services.

This is not a sustainable way of ensuring that citizens have access to high-quality health care, no matter what the Obamarama crowd pretends.