Conservatives are touting the VA scandal as evidence of what happens with government healthcare and, by extension, what we can expect with more government healthcare thanks to Obama-care. They point to the VA fiasco as a microcosm of what Americans can anticipate en masse as “progressives” fundamentally transform healthcare and the nation.

Of course, they’re exactly right. No question. But what they’re missing is how this same insanity is a microcosm of what the left intends, how the left will operate, and precisely where we’re headed as a country. The VA scandal bodes well for the left’s grand designs. How so?

The liberal left, the “progressive” left, the socialist left, the communist left, and whatever other left, will employ the VA scandal as a case study of what happens not when government takes over and destroys healthcare but of what happens when government healthcare is not adequately funded. The problem, leftists will insist, is not government centralization, management, and planning, but the failure of cruel and miserly Republicans to fully fund what needs to be funded.

If you haven’t noticed, liberals are taking to websites and radio and TV right now to make just that point. They will continue to do so in the decades ahead as government devours more and more of the private healthcare industry. Even if radical leftists somehow achieve their utopian dream of a total federal takeover of every hospital, they will always argue that the subsequent disastrous system—replete with inefficiencies, rationing, and unnecessary death—has nothing to do with the nature of government or government management; no, they will always insist that the failures result from inadequate funding. They do that now with public schools. They will do it on steroids with healthcare.

For Democrats, this will be tailor-made for tarring and feathering their Republican opponents. Each and every Republican congressman who claims that the inherent problem is a government-run system will be demonized as nothing short of a gargoyle, a Count Dracula who sucks blood from the needy. He will be raked over the coals, dragged to the guillotine by the progressive mob. He will be deemed almost subhuman in his heartlessness.

Likewise, for Democrats and leftists of all stripes, this will be an excellent vehicle for fomenting class warfare. The failures of their government healthcare system will be unhesitatingly laid at the feet of the diabolical rich, who will be portrayed as yet again not paying their fair share. It will be the fault of the wealthy, along with their selfish protectors—the vile Republicans who refuse to increase taxes to necessary levels.

As for the American public, it will be easy prey. I no longer trust a majority of Americans to recognize the truth and see through the left’s propaganda. The low-information voter will be putty in the hands of these crass demagogues.

Hate and envy and division works magnificently for the left. It always has. Love that hate!

In turn, all of this will enable the American left to attempt to do what it really wants to do: jack up marginal income tax rates to pre-Reagan levels, especially on the wealthy. This means upper rates of 70%. The left will argue that such high rates are needed to sustain the healthcare system that’s failing because of under-funding by conservatives, by Republicans, by the rich, by the selfish.

More still, those high tax rates would empower the left to do what it’s aching to do: redistribute wealth and level income. Second to maybe only gay marriage, few things so impassion the left quite like “income inequality.” The Piketty book is like a modern Biblical text inflaming that desire even more so. This will be a crusade.

Sadly, of course, the high tax rates will strangle overall prosperity, thus shrinking the pot of available revenue, and further prompting the left—driven as it is by emotion—to scream that the problem isn’t a lack of money but money being hoarded by fat cats and their fire-breathing Republican guardians. Any semi-decent Democrat class-warfare specialist can easily push that one.

In all, this is a very distressing situation, all made possible by the oblivious citizens who twice voted for Barack Obama without any conception or inkling of any of this. They are the duped whose votes paved the way for the left to do what it’s doing. The left is more confident than ever, and with social media and education under its control… look out.

How do you stop this? Well, you simply need to defeat it at the ballot box—if we’re not too late.