Sometimes Hillary Clinton leaves me breathless with the sheer arrogance of her assumption that the American people are like a bunch of straw-chewing rubes eager to buy her latest brand of snake oil.

She introduced her latest excursion into the field of health care in America by assuring us that under her national health care plan people will no longer be denied needed emergency medical services because they lack health insurance.

Hillary knows that the law provides that nobody can be turned away because of their inability to pay for needed medical services — she just hopes the voters don’t know that. She wants them to think that some cruel tyrant stands at the emergency room door barring entrance to the poor and needy.

Illegal immigrants, for example, know what a phony claim that is. They know the law better than most American citizens. The illegals get all the health care they want, because they know the law guarantees those services without them having to pay one red cent for it.

Hillary goes on to assure Americans that health care is a right and not a privilege. Ignoring the fact that rights have no price tag attached – you don’t have to pay to exercise the right of free speech, for example - yet she puts a price tag on the right to have health care at $110 billion a year. That’s what she wants us to pay for the alleged right to health care.

She says that the annual cost of $110 billion will be paid by increasing taxes on those Americans whose taxable income is $250,000 a year. She doesn’t explain that there are not enough taxpayers making that kind of money to come up with enough tax dollars to finance that $110 billion annual price tag.

As one of my listeners pointed out, in 1948 the United States Supreme Court ruled that no American citizens can be charged for their rights. Hillary is now ruling that Americans can now be billed $110 billion a year for the right to have health care.

Whenever left-wing Democrats make a proposal they always make at least a part of their plan mandatory. They can’t help it – it’s in their blood to want to force people to do what they want them to do.

So Hillarycon would force every man, woman and child in the United States to have health insurance, whether they want it or not. They get no choice in the matter. To Democrats such as Hillary the only right of choice they recognize is a woman’s right to choose to kill the baby in her womb. All other rights of choice are up for grabs.

Hillary and her fellow Marxists keep peddling the line that there are 47 million Americans who have no health insurance – implying that they are too poor to be able to pay for it. That’s tommyrot and they know it.

According to Investor’s Business Daily, about 38 percent of the estimated 47 percent of the American people who lack health insurance have incomes in excess of $50,000 a year. Moreover, about 20 percent of all uninsured Americans have incomes over $75,000 a year.

These people can afford coverage, but for whatever reason choose not to buy it. You have to ask yourself why Hillary and John Edwards and Obama want to take away the right of these people to choose to remain uninsured.

If they insist on talking about our rights as Americans, why can’t they recognize our right to say, “No, we don’t want health insurance”?

If I’m willing to take the chance that I won’t have health care problems this year, and am not willing to buy insurance to pay for an illness or accident I don’t anticipate, that’s my choice – not Hillary’s.

The new version of Hillarycare is just another Clintonian con game – a neatly wrapped bottle of snake oil. She doesn’t want you to read the price tag and the label on the bottle that warns that the contents may taste good but are utterly devoid of anything good for your health.

©2007 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.