The Empire Strikes Back.

The Left/Mainstream Media may have been caught flatfooted by the recent tsunami of resistance to their proposed government takeover of your health care, but they are now, dear readers, working overtime to give maximum exposure to the Team Hopenchange spin.

Here's a classic example from this morning's The Early Show on CBS. Note that the person Harry Smith has on explaining "what is fact, and what is fiction" is one Jonathan Cohn, the author of "Sick", senior editor of The New Republic (a left-of-center magazine), and an advocate of a government controlled, single-payer, health care system. Mr. Cohn is clearly a defender of, and advocate for, ObamaCare, and is hardly an unbiased or non-partisan resource. But Harry doesn't seem to think Mr. Cohn's bias for single-payer socialized medicine is worth mentioning, and he treats him as a neutral and authoritative sage with respect to ObamaCare. So, how biased was Mr. Cohn? Well, watch the video - his answers to the questions posed were pretty much the Team Hopenchange talking points. No surprise there. And also to no one's surprise, Harry Smith never questioned Mr. Cohn's narrative and played right along.

My biggest beef was with the talking point, "if you like your current health insurance, you can keep it." Technically, under ObamaCare that is correct. Technically. But operationally, it's utter bullshit; and here's why:

Our firm offers all full-time employees a paid high-deductible major medical policy, coupled with an interest-bearing, fully portable Health Savings Account (HSA) to cover the deductible. We contribute an HSA match for our employees up to a particular amount. This plan has proven popular with the staff, and popular with our bottom line.

But under ObamaCare, we lose the freedom to offer this plan in future to new employees. Section 102 of HR 3200 says once ObamaCare takes effect, we will be limited, by Law, to only offering an insurance plan whose structure, benefits, premiums, and scope of services are those mandated by some government Commissioner. It will be the only game in town, and the only real choice will be who we buy it from - this private insurer, or that one. Or, the government.

Further, even if "I like my current health insurance," under ObamaCare there are little landmines of bureaucratic regulations designed force you into a government mandated plan, if not the government option. Read further in Section 102 of HR 3200, and you will see that your insurer can not make any changes to your current health insurance; if they do, the plan will no longer be allowed. If your insurer discontinues offering the plan you like, under ObamaCare you will not be able to replace it with a similar plan from another carrier. In either case you will have only one option available - a government-approved policy, from the government-run "Health Insurance Exchange", with a government-mandated set of benefits. You will have no choice.

So Mr. Cohn and Mr. Smith, here is the crux of our opposition: We not only like the insurance choices we now have enough to want to keep them - we like the insurance choices we have now enough to want others to have them in future. ObamaCare takes that freedom away from everyone and gives it to a group of un-elected government bureaucrats. We do not want that. It replaces the individual's freedom to choose (and the freedom to be without coverage is a choice...) with a single option that we all MUST eventually participate in, whether we want to, or not. That is not a right; that is coercion.

And that, to quote Mrs. Pelosi, is un-American.