This is the fine point on the socialized medicine needle the Democrats are trying to jab into our arms.  They’re using the “it’s for the children” tactic and everything.

Trust me on this.

WASHINGTON - Brushing aside threats of a presidential veto, a Senate committee on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a five-year, $35 billion expansion of a children’s health insurance program that would be financed through higher tobacco taxes.

A majority of Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee joined all of the committee’s Democrats in voting to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which subsidizes insurance for children and some adults with incomes too high for Medicaid but not high enough to afford private insurance. The vote was 17-4.

“There are more kids without health insurance than there are kids in the first and second grades,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee chairman. “Americans overwhelmingly support getting kids covered.”

The additional spending approved by the committee would bring total SCHIP funding to $60 billion over five years — double what the administration has proposed. The tax on a pack of cigarettes would increase by 61 cents to help pay for the expansion. Taxes on cigars and chewing tobacco also would jump.

This entitlement expansion is not only funded by that 22,000% tax increase on cigars I posted about earlier this week, it also opens up this program to be used not just by people who need it but rather pretty much every single American given that in order to qualify for it a family need only earn $82,000/year or less.

Keep in mind that approximately 83% of American households earn around $82,000 or less according to the Census Bureau.

This is how liberals herd people onto the victimhood plantation.  They tell them that they’re poor and can’t afford health care on their own, then they vote other people’s money out of the nation’s treasury to pay for these people’s entitlements and make them dependent on the government and finally they use that dependence to control them.

Just like how Democrats get votes from farmers by turning them into victims and then pandering to them with subsidies.  Same with minority groups like blacks too.  “You can’t get ahead unless we give you affirmative action and all sorts of special treatment, so vote for us!” It isn’t about empowerment, or making people better so that they can stand on their own two feet, it’s about subjugation.

And trust me, that’s what socialized medicine will be (in addition to terribly expensive, inefficient and ineffective).  Subjugation.  Once we’re all hooked on government health care, and once private health care providers are so marginalized by an inability to compete with the government (which has no need to turn a profit) that only the rich can afford them, our dependence on politicians for health care will be used to change how we live.

The anti-smoking folks will be demanding that smokers pay more in taxes.  The anti-fat people will be demanding that regulations against unhealthy foods be passed for the sake of saving tax dollars.  And all this while you wait six months for knee surgery like they do in Canada and Great Britain.