You will be "free" to buy private insurance. And this will facilitate the big lie Obama and the liberals will tell all summer long with constant help from the liberal press: We aren't nationalizing the health care system. This isn't socialized medicine. But government-owned health insurance will quickly become an offer you can't refuse.

If Obama gets what he wants, private health insurance companies will be thrown into competition with an entity that can draw on the entire taxing-and-borrowing power of the federal government to subsidize its product.

Employers faced with the choice of buying the more expensive private insurance or the subsidized government product will obviously gravitate toward the government plan. This will be especially true of large, public-stock companies run by remote corporate managers whose personal interest in profit may not be mitigated by any moral or sentimental consideration for their workers, most of whom they have never met.

If Obama prevails in the health care debate, the last surviving customers of the last surviving private health-insurance companies will be old-time American capitalists -- entrepreneurs who own their own companies, actually know and care about their employees, and see money not as an end in itself but as an instrument to be used in the pursuit a higher good.

The coup de grace for these old-time American individualists -- the type of people who built our country, made it wealthy and kept it free -- is already being calculated in the White House and on Capitol Hill, where they are talking about diminishing the tax exemption for the insurance premiums paid by corporations.

Obama and congressional liberals will demonize successful American entrepreneurs riding outside the socialist system as "rich" people whose "corporate" wealth can be tapped by eliminating their insurance "tax break" to pay for the government insurance of the less privileged.

Big business, having already dumped its workers onto the government insurance rolls, will crawl into bed with big government. Your liberty will be crushed as these behemoths embrace.

Socialized medicine must be stopped this summer -- or not at all.