Elizabeth Scalia argues that socialized medicine looks inevitable:

Some time after Labor Day, many Americans will start to focus on the November elections, and they'll be surprised to learn that while they were at the mall, government-run health care moved from being a vague idea to an essentially "done deal." In just eighteen weeks Americans will, with every vote, submit to the idea of the government -- that master of mismanagement -- having a formidable control over their health care. Logic dictates that the common realities of age and illness -- which come to us all -- will steadily endow the government with ever-increasing authority over life choices and inevitable intrusions into decisions that should be private.

Once the thing is put into motion, there will be no pulling back. American presidents may peacefully surrender their power, but bureaucrats never do.

Republicans have done little or nothing to stop the onslaught. They get my vote only because I prefer slowing the pace of socialism to speeding it up.

As Scalia reminds, it's not as if we weren't warned:

We cannot say we were not warned. For more than 15 years politicos and media folk have asserted the need for government-managed health care, until their drone became little more than background music to our daily waltzes. But knowing the government wanted to mandate health care coverage for every citizen, perhaps Americans should have taken some time to investigate exactly who the "millions of uninsured Americans" are; many of them are young adults choosing to opt out of coverage. Perhaps we should have attempted to first demonstrate that the government could successfully serve the uninsured minority, before subjecting the entire nation -- and a large chunk of the economy -- to an untried program.

Which is not surprising, because socialism does not work.

As I keep saying, that might be the whole idea.

(The fact that socialized medicine will not work is not a bug, but a feature.)