The fastest way to reduce a nation from free to unfree is for its government to take charge of its health.

It may also be a reliable way to shrink the nation. Countries with national health services also have low fertility rates.

It’s a pleasant enough state of affairs for some members of the medical profession in such countries in this twilight of the West. True, the underpaid general practitioners are worked half to death, but obstetricians and pediatricians take early retirement, and geriatricians take long vacations from their stints of duty on the death panels. Undertakers buy stately homes.

If central government takes over health care in America, nothing will be different. Just bigger. To treat the only large demographics, young adults and the able-bodied middle-aged – in other words, those who escaped the abortionist’s scissors and are not yet old enough to be denied all curative measures – the inflictors of medical care will need large accommodations.

Justin Haskins discusses the prospect of a US national health service at Townhall :

Until recently, only the far left of the Democratic Party openly called for … socialized medicine. Few remember that when the Democrats last had control of the House of Representatives, in 2010, most Democrats chose to reject pushing for a single-payer health care model, despite the fact they had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Even then-President Barack Obama, a longtime supporter of enacting a single-payer scheme, told members of his party that it would be better, at least temporarily, to pursue a more moderate course.

Fast-forward to 2018. Emboldened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s success in pushing his “Medicare for All” single-payer model while running for president in 2016, many congressional Democrats have radically changed their tune. Not only has single-payer health care become one of the defining issues for Democrats today, in many respects, it seems as though it’s the party’s only issue … other than calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, of course.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to federal elections. Many gubernatorial candidates are saying it’s time for government to take over the health care marketplace. For instance, in “purple” Florida, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, the Democrats’ choice to recapture Florida’s governorship, has been a vocal supporter of Sanders’s single-payer scheme, although he admits it would be difficult for Florida to enact single-payer on its own.

But while the cries for socialized medicine have grown louder in the United States, across the pond, England’s national health care program, the National Health Service, is facing huge difficulties liberals in America don’t want you to know about.

Earlier in October, reports emerged that the National Health Service’s forthcoming 10-year plan will include a policy change that will make group appointments with primary care doctors the “default” option for those with long-term health problems. Under the new model, patients will be expected to meet with doctors in groups of 15 to save money and time. …

During these group primary care visits, which will reportedly last about two hours each, patients will be expected to share their health care concerns as they would normally in more traditional one-on-one appointments.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Who would ever want to discuss sex, obesity, hemorrhoids, or any other deeply personal health care problem in front of a group of 14 other strangers—or, even worse, neighbors? But fear not! The government masterminds in England have a solution: Groups will be formed based on common health problems, such as diabetes and erectile dysfunction, because, you know, all people with diabetes and erectile dysfunction are basically the same. And to ensure no one in the group discusses the ailments of others when the group primary care session ends, each person will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement pledging not to share what they heard with people who weren’t present for the appointment.

It’s astonishing the faith politicians and bureaucrats have in pieces of paper! They believe a sheet or two can forestall every peril from gossip to war.

I can’t think of a more bizarre and insulting way to treat patients suffering from serious and sometimes embarrassing diseases than to force them to discuss their problems in front of a group of their peers, but this is the sort of thing that happens when the good of collective matters more than the rights of the individual.

This isn’t the only controversy facing the NHS, either. For several years, critics of the health care system have complained that it’s wildly underfunded and, as a result, suffering from long wait times for patients. …

No one denies the United States has plenty of health care problems of its own, and the Obamacare model imposed on Americans by the Democrats in 2010 has only made things significantly worse. But the solutions to those flaws in our current system can’t be found in the government-controlled systems of Canada or Europe because government almost always creates more problems than it solves …

This isn’t revolutionary thinking. Why would we put the same people who can’t operate the Postal Service, Amtrak, or the DMV in charge of the health care system?

The Dems’ proposal for an American national health service requires a wage decrease for doctors. Do the proposers understand that they may be launching a doctor shortage?

Will the American ill-paid doctors see people with similar conditions in batches of 15? As the population here is much bigger than in Britain, they may need to see them in batches of, say, 50. Row after row of examination tables in examination halls where the naked patients lie, hearing each other groan, seeing palsy shake each other’s few last grey hairs, or how youth has grown specter thin, and where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs. (Not original. Quoting John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.)

To a conservative who lived in a Western country through the decades of the Cold War, the current fashion for Socialism in America is likely to be shocking and terrifying. To those who lived under the iron heel of Soviet Socialism in Eastern Europe, or any other Marxist regime, it must be many times worse.

(Throughout this article, “Socialism” and “Communism” are used interchangeably – as was customary in the USSR.)

Some dangerously under-informed American women entering the political arena seem really to think that it is a pretty thing, Socialism.

Here’s one of them – Democrat Cynthia Nixon, who fortunately lost her challenge to the Democrat Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo by a difference of 30% of the votes – smilingly, in all the self-deceiving self-confidence of ignorance, urging Socialism on New York voters:

And here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district – demonstrating how innocent she is of Economics:

Another fan of Socialism, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, wants to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2020.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page on Cory Booker’s claim to be Spartacus: a hero of resistance to ancient Roman tyranny re-canonized by Communists in the 1950s. Booker founded his claim on the extreme daring he showed in rising against the Left-alleged tyranny of President Trump – by making public certain documents, in relation to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, that were in fact already public.

As Billingsley says, “Booker’s gambit was something of a bust.”

He goes on to tell us how one Communist, the author of the novel Sparticus, lost his faith.

The movie Booker cited is based on the 1951 novel Spartacus by Howard Fast, a Communist pisseur d’encre whom Time magazine had dubbed “Big Brother’s U.S. pen pal.” In 1953, Fast won the Stalin Peace Prize, the only American to win the award other than Paul Robeson, a black American Communist who spent his life defending all-white Soviet dictatorships.

Stalin died in 1953 and three years later, Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes and mass atrocities to the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress. The revelation devastated many American Communists and motivated Howard Fast to write The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, released in 1957.

Khrushchev’s revelations, Fast wrote, “itemizes a record of barbarism and paranoiac bloodlust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man”.  Communism is not social science but “naked terror, awful brutality and frightening ignorance“.  Fast denounced “Stalin and the collection of hangmen and murderers around him” and charged that the Communist Party is “based on pseudo-religious cant, cemented with neurotic fear and parading ritualistic magic as a substitute for reason”.  And the Spartacus scribe wasn’t done.

The only people who resisted the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, Fast wrote, were “the mental revolutionaries, the parlor pinks, the living-room warriors, the mink coated allies of the working class”. These were “Sick people who had seen no death [other] than a painted corpse in a funeral parlor, no other violence than an auto crash – these people lusted for an Armageddon their mad dreams had promised them.” …

The Spartacus screenwriter was Dalton Trumbo, who joined the Communist Party during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, when many others left, and remained in the Party after the Khrushchev revelations. Trumbo hated Fast’s Naked God but he wasn’t going to pass up a big payday. And since Trumbo had been one of the famed Hollywood Ten, Spartacus remains a classic on the big screen of the left, which duly consigned The Naked God to the forbidden list.

While some fled the Communist Party after 1956 many others remained and the Soviets continued to run candidates in American elections. In 1976 their candidate for president was Gus Hall, an old-line Stalinist, with Jarvis Tyner for vice president. College student John Brennan voted for Gus Hall and incredibly enough, only four years later in 1980 Brennan gained employment at the CIA, which he headed under POTUS 44.

One of those Americans who remained faithful to Communism and the Soviet Union was Angela Davis. In 1979 Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize, her primary for the Communist ticket in 1980, with Davis for vice president under Hall. The same duo lost to Reagan and Bush in 1984, and thereafter the Communist Party USA declined to run candidates and urged their supporters to vote for the Democratic Party.

In 1988, American Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, where the gulags were still functioning and Soviet bosses torturing political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals. If Hillary Clinton had not rigged the primaries, Sanders would have been the Democrats’ candidate in 2016.

Cory Booker wants to be the candidate in 2020, and his bid for a  “Spartacus moment” suggests that he knows the Old Left back story. For their part, Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon and Andrew Gillum [Florida’s Democratic Gubernatorial nominee. also advocating Socialism without perhaps fully realizing that he is], like their media supporters, show little if any familiarity with The Naked God, The God That Failed, and The Road to Serfdom.

Right. They show no familiarity whatsoever with the theory or practice of the Socialism that charms them so. If Cory Booker knows, and yet desires to impose the horror that is Socialism on his fellow Americans, he is a lot worse than they are.  

On every hand they rise crying “I am socialist!” thereby confirming ignorance of the actual record. Howard Fast, who died in 2003, knew what socialism was all about. So did Milan Kundera, who wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

Candidates can’t recall what they never knew in the first place.

They need to be told, but their teachers have not told them, and will not tell them: Socialism is hungry, bleak, smelly, shabby, hopeless, poor, cold, painful and very frightening.