Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama plan to institute a universal health care plan when they become president. They pledge to cover every citizen in the United States, but they don’t want us to know one thing: how much it will really cost.

California just had its latest plan for universal health care squashed before it was even voted for. It was not squashed by the RINO governor, but by the Democrats in the California Congress. They looked at the program and saw its fatal flaw. It was just too expensive:

Like collapses in Illinois, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, this one crumpled because of the costs, which are always much higher than anticipated. The truth teller was state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, who thought to ask about the price tag of a major new entitlement amid what’s already a $14.5 billion budget shortfall.

An independent analysis confirmed the plan would be far more expensive than proponents admitted. Even under the most favorable assumptions, spending would outpace revenue by $354 million after two years, and likely $3.9 billion or more. “A situation that I thought was bad,” Mr. Perata noted, “in fact was worse.”

This reveals that liberal health-care politics is increasingly the art of the impossible: You can’t make coverage “universal” while at the same time keeping costs in check — at least without prohibitive tax increases. Lowering cost and increasing access, in other words, are separate and irreconcilable issues.

With the federal government already $9 trillion in debt, is this really practical? Not in the least, but you can count on either one of these to Saul Alinsky socialists to forget about practicality and implement it anyway, justified by massively increasing the taxes on the wealthy.

It is nothing but socialism and will only make the problem worse, as it has every where it has been tried.