In his crusade to bring health care - one-sixth of the country's economy - under government control, President Obama is asking Americans to swallow a huge and potentially poisonous policy pill.

Just as many Canadian politicians and their families have, hypocritically, come to the U.S. when they prefer our advanced, private health care over their own socialized system, President Obama got caught last night in a "do as I say not as I do" moment. In a special broadcast on ABC, the president refused to pledge that he'd limit his own family to the tests and treatments that the general public would have to confine themselves to under his proposed health care "public option" restrictions.

Obama dismisses as "fear tactics" charges that his program amounts to "socialized medicine" similar to Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden. Yet, ironically, Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden are all beginning to open their socialized systems to private care due to citizen protests that critical treatments are delayed or denied. The past president of the Canadian Medical Association says that in Canada, "¦a dog can get a hip replaced in under a week but a human may wait two to three years."

None of this deters Obama from his insistence on government-run health care. And while he bases the need for reform on cost savings and universal coverage, the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that Obamacare would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6-trillion over ten years even while leaving 30 million people uninsured.

This week, Obama is leading a charge to use Democrats to ram through draft health reform legislation in the Senate, excluding Republican input. Obama's rush to pass health care reform by August 1 is the centerpiece of his plan to do a "community reorganization" of America by putting more of the private sector under government control and tying the middle class to government with the major entitlement of health insurance.

But according to Michael Cannon, writing in National Review, "there aren't enough Americans earning more than $250,000 to finance [Obamacare] reform would mean higher taxes for the middle class, violating another promise Obama made during the presidential campaign." Further, "if Congress used Medicare's payment rates and opened the new program to everyone, it could pull 120 million Americans out of private insurance more than half of the private market" and boost the government rolls by an even larger number. Two-thirds of Americans would depend on government for their health care, compared with just over one-quarter today. That would strike a historic blow against even the possibility of limited government."

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