HILLARY: HER COMMENTS GIVE HER AWAY

A few weeks ago, I published a column that likened the Clinton Health Care plan, as it relates to struggling entrepreneurs and small business owners, to Joe Stalin's extermination (by state-planned and enforced famine) of 10 million Ukrainian peasants during the 1930s. Many readers no doubt thought that to be too harsh. My observation was triggered by a chilling remark made by Hillary Rodham Clinton. She made it in response to a Democratic congressman from Virginia who asked the First Lady how small business people could hope to survive the crushing cost burden the Clinton plan meant for them. To the inquiry from Rep. Norm Sisisky, Hillary tartly responded, "Look, I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."

I have since discovered a first cousin of that remark in another of Hillary's utterances, one that suggests the chilling mindset I skewered earlier is neither an isolated nor a meaningless aside. Rather, the frightening truth is that this brutal thinking lies at the heart of the Clinton health care plan.

Consider the amazing response of our co-President to an inquiry from another small business person, this time from an insurance agent, a class of independent business people whom the Clintons have quite brazenly targeted for extinction. The following excerpt is from America's most widely circulated newspaper.

Clinton health plan casualty:

The health-insurance agent

"TOLEDO As a health-insurance agent, Lori Proctor was naturally curious about how the Clinton health care plan would affect her job.

"So when she visited the White House last month as part of a group of northern Ohio business people, she put the question about her future directly to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"The answer left her shaken. ~`I'm assuming anyone as obviously brilliant as you could find something else to market,' the First Lady said."

Roll it around in your mind. Reflect on it:

I'm assuming anyone as obviously brilliant as you could find something else to market.

"Hoping to tame health care costs, the Clinton health plan tries to trim administrative fat out of the health care system. But only one job would be legislated out of existence: health-insurance agents. There are about 150,000 Americans who make most of their living selling health coverage.

"Under the Clinton proposal, consumers would buy health insurance from purchasing cooperatives, known as health alliances. Agents would be barred from selling the insurance offered by the alliances.

"At first, the savings appear to be huge. Insurance agents earn about $3.8 billion a year in commissions on health coverage. But the services they provide, such as explaining benefits and fighting with insurance companies over denied claims, would have to be made up by someone perhaps government employees.

"That scares some people. `I don't see consumers being very well served by that,' says Saul Spivack, a consultant with Tillinghast, an actuarial consulting firm. `It will be like dealing with the Department of Motor Motor Vehicles.'

"... Mrs. Proctor ... specializes in selling group health policies to small employers ...

"Mrs. Proctor, 35 years old, has about 100 clients and earns about $45,000 a year, most of it from commissions on policy renewals. ..." Wall Street Journal

I repeat: Such remarks tell us more about the Clinton health care reform plan than 10 dozen hearings, or 10 thousand pages of documents.

This is the biggest and most brazen attempt of our lifetimes to restrict individual freedom and expand government's already immense power. An attempt is being made to socialize our health care system, approximately one-seventh of our enormous economy. If it is ever enacted into law, we will not be able to say we were not warned, that we did not understand what was at stake.