The scene is the daily White House Press Briefing, presided over by the unlikable and incompetent (not a good combination) White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. (We miss you soo much, Tony Snow.) When asked about rumors regarding a possibly imminent Value Added Tax (VAT), Gibbsy replies:

I think I directly answered this the other day by saying that it wasn’t something that the president had under consideration.

You know– I know that there’s been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax–(Yeah.  Paul Volcker started it.) that is something that has worked for some countries. It’s something that would be novel– for the United States. And before, you know, I started saying, “This makes sense or that makes sense.” I want to get a better picture of what our options are.

And my first priority is to figure out how can we reduce wasteful spending so that– you know, we have a baseline of the core services that we need and the government should provide. And then we decide how do we pay for that. (Why start now?)  As opposed to figuring out how much money can we raise and then– not have to make some tough choices on the spending side.

For those that do not know, a VAT is a tax which taxes the value that is added at each stage of production of certain commodities.  It is already in place in several European countries. (So, you know Scooter loves it.)

Ready for another shot to the gut?  Here’s some figures from the legendary Dr. Charles Krauthammer:

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus doctor fix, the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare pre-empts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare’s $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

So, Americans are looking at a  tax burden bigger than Rosie O’Donnell after three trips to the buffet line.   Will this solve Scooter’s problems and achieve his goal of radically changing America?

The United Kingdom has implemented a VAT.  I wonder how they’re doing?  Has it helped their National Healthcare System?  Not hardly.

In the United Kingdom, health care is tax-funded and government-run. The government directly pays doctors and pays hospital fees. Patients do not receive bills for National Health Service (NHS) care. All citizens and legal residents are automatically part of this universal system. In terms of financing, 95% of funding comes from taxes and around 5% comes from user charges (for items like co-payments and costs associated with prescription drugs).

Long wait times have become second nature, despite dangerous consequences. In the period between 2001 and 2006, the United Kingdom saw the median wait time increase from 44 to 51 days for hospital admission after the decision to admit had been made. In 2004, according to a BBC report, waiting times in Scotland and England were 8 months for cataract surgery, 11 months for hip surgery, 12 months for knee replacement, 5 months for repairing a slipped disk, and 5 months for hernia operations. In 2007, in 42% of the localities surveyed, hospitals had to turn women in childbirth away because their maternity wards were full.

The government’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) advises which high-cost treatments should and should not be covered. As reported in the June 8 Time magazine, “NICE uses a metric called quality-adjusted life year (QALY), which grades a person’s health-related quality of life from 0 to 1. … NICE rarely approves a drug that costs more than 45,000 per QALY.

Is there any doubt this is where we’re headed?  Especially after news leaked yesterday that:

Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.

There is no doubt, that if it were solely up to the President of the United States, we would already have a Government-run Healthcare System.  If Obamacare is allowed to continue, unchecked by elections and repeals,we will.  Once single payer and the VAT are a fact of American life, Scooter will have achieved his goal of radically changing the greatest country on the face of the Earth into just another third-rate failed Marxist experiment.