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As the "healthcare" debate reaches its contrived crescendo, Barack Obama is proving to be the perfect con man. In every instance, he tells adoring crowds and media sycophants what they want to hear, often contradicting last week's statements with this week's damage control sound bite. And considering that his poll numbers have remained above single digits, it must be conceded that to some extent the ploy is working.

Nevertheless, over time Obama's vision for America has materialized. It is an ugly picture. Fantastic promises of lavish government provisions for every citizen (and non citizen) eventually reveal themselves to be a well-crafted veneer overlaying bureaucratic nightmares from which no law-abiding citizen can hope to escape. In stark contrast, no real "benefit" is to be reaped from this encroaching monster. Instead, the people are merely assured on a regular basis that their condition is of great concern to the ruling class. But the specifics of each monstrous new program, whenever mentioned, tell another story.

Of course the most prominent example of late is the matter of nationalized "health care," which Obama assures us is not socialism. Despite his assurances, when the diatribe promoting medicine as a "right" is stripped away, all that remains is an unfathomable bureaucratic web, which at the end of the day requires resources from one citizen in order to pay the medical bills of another. In the process, the power and influence of government grows enormously. But it is not socialism.

The picture gets far worse still. Addressing the inevitability of an overloaded and unaccountable system during one of those moments in which his teleprompter did not present the state approved talking point, Obama let slip the grim truth that the rationing of care, and the likelihood of it deliberately being withheld from certain individuals, would be determined by such dispassionate factors as the age of the intended recipient.

Things are close to coming full circle for those seniors who empowered the Democrats and the nanny state by obsessing over Social Security at the expense of every other issue. Just as "viability" (or the ostensible lack thereof) according to abortion proponents is sufficient reason to make a determination of life or death for an innocent unborn child, so will "quality of life" be deemed an equally acceptable reason to render or deny proper care to any elderly person.

Americans have access to the best health care system in the world. The hospitals in the city of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania alone house more MRI machines than all of Canada's hospitals combined. No one in this country is ever forced to endure unwarranted waiting periods for routine medical procedures, as is invariably the case in any country where the government has seized control of the medical industry. This is the brave new world of Obamacare.

Perhaps it may seem that all of the alarmism is overwrought and premature. Does Barack Obama possibly warrant such mistrust on this crucial issue? Unfortunately, his consistent and appalling track record of fraud and deceit answers that question decisively.

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