So what's the end game and why the great rush? Mark Steyn tries Untangling the Spaghetti
The end-game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent”, I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything.
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In the normal course of events, the process takes a while. But Obama believes in “the fierce urgency of now”, and fierce it is. That’s where all the poor befuddled sober centrists who can’t understand why the Democrats keep passing incoherent 1,200-page bills every week are missing the point. If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.
It's very true.
Try to imagine a situation where you have a huge number on welfare or benefitting from expensive but unnecessary or counterproductive services, plus a huge number making a living providing these things. And then imagine trying to elect a government that wants to reform such a situation because it's unaffordable.
You instantly have millions of voters against you. The UK is an example of where this might go... although the Labour party has done so badly lately that even that might not be enough to save them.
Dalrymple has some good articles about this; i.e. http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_01_28_05td.html