One more point

Since the House is going to have to re-vote on the Health Care Bill, I figure I can get in one more health care post before I lose my entire audience.

There are many people trying to predict America's future in the wake of health care reform.  I am leary of these claims because they are so often wrong.  With regard to health care, will this bill decrease medically-induced bankruptcies, mortality rates, and the deficit?  Depends on who you ask.  Will this plan stifle entrepreneurship, raise taxes, and crush any incentive for investments in medical technology?  I hope not.       

But, one prediction that I would put money on comes from Mark Steyn in Investor's Business Daily:

[...] the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible.

In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect. (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative.”) The result is a kind of two-party one-party state:  Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic.

  [Emphasis mine]

I'd disagree with Mark that "Republicans seem to have difffiiculty grasping this basic dynamic."  I'm pretty sure that they do understand this fact, I just don't think many elected officials in the Republican party care if the political culture shifts to left-of-center.  Because if they truly cared about conservative principles, then they would have attempted to take steps toward limited/small government during the four years that Republican's had control of the House, Senate, and Presidency under the Bush Administration (not to mention the extra two years that there was a Republican controlled House under Bush). 

That is what disappoints me the most about Republicans.  There was plenty of time to enact government limiting measures, but they couldn't control themselves.  And now they want to play catch up?  Now they decided to return to their foundational principals of smaller government, legal conservatism, individual freedom, free enterprise, and a pride in American exceptionalism?  Too little, too late.