But these congressional leaders are just whistling Dixie—an apt metaphor, since their real problem is their inability to convince Southern "Blue Dog" Democrats. The health-care bill was never held up because moderate Republicans refused their support. It was held up because moderate Democrats refused to support it.

More likely, the Democrats will attempt to water down the bill and offer fake compromises such as the substitution of government-backed health-insurance "co-ops" for the "public option"—a distinction without much of a difference. Over the weekend, the White House briefly indicated its support for this tactical retreat, only to backtrack when faced with opposition from far left congressmen in the House. That reversal actually makes the dropping of the "public option" more likely. The administration's flip-flop tells every wavering congressman that the White House is in disarray and cannot be trusted to take a position and stick to it—so why should anyone in Congress stick their necks out? A lot of them will say what Florida Democrat Allen Boyd told a town hall meeting over the weekend: that he is willing to "scrap everything," in the words of one of his questioners, and start over from scratch on the health-care bill.

But don't be fooled by attempts to compromise and water down this bill, because the fundamental issue is not any one specific provision in it. The issue is the very existence of the new government health-care bureaucracy it would create.

An amusing "live-blogging" of the health-care bill—a blogger sharing his observations as he reads through all 1,017 pages of HR 3200—has been making the rounds on the Web, and what I found most interesting about it was his description of the first 100 pages of the bill.

As you begin reading the actual text of the bill, you begin to notice a pattern. Roles and responsibilities of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Commissioners. Ombudsmen. Auditors. Assistants. Departments. Commissions. You begin to realize you are reading a verbal description of a corporate organizational chart, with lengthy discussions of how these people will be staffed, compensated, replaced, and so on….

[A] lot of the sections, like 2714 and 2754, purport to discuss ensuring lower premiums. But…[I] found nothing that described specifics. Instead, there were blanket statements that it will be someone's responsibility to find a way to lower premiums…. [T]here's no discussion of how this will save money; but there are concepts thrown around about how the SecHHS will review a bunch of different options to find the best ones representative for each type of group member. Same as before: we will make healthcare affordable for all Americans by finding a way.

This blogger is looking at the bill from the perspective of someone trying to evaluate the Democrats' promise that the bill will reduce health-care spending. But let's look at this from the perspective of simply trying to figure out exactly what the bill will do. In effect, the bill sets up an enormous bureaucracy for the purpose of regulating health-insurance in a way that will reduce health-care costs—but leaves to a future bureaucracy all of the actual, specific decisions about how this is to be done.

In short, the fundamental purpose of this bill is not to establish a "public option" or "end-of-life planning" or any other specific outcome. Its purpose is to establish a functioning bureaucracy with the legal authority to regulate all aspects of health insurance and health-care spending. What that bureaucracy will actually do is a detail to be worked out later by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, or the Health Choices Commissioner, or some other executive-branch functionary.

Is it any wonder we're afraid that our private health-insurance will be taken away because the Health Choices Commissioner decides to impose regulations that hound private insurers out of the market? Or that we're terrified of "death panels"? What do you expect, when you create an unelected bureaucracy charged with cutting health-care costs—without ever specifying exactly what they are empowered to cut?

This is why the American people simply do not trust this bill—and it is why it must be defeated in any form. It does not matter much whether the Democrats strip out one obnoxious provision or another. Once the government takes on this newly expanded role as regulator plenipotentiary of the health-insurance industry, the power to achieve the left's entire wish list will be shifted from Congress to a new, unelected health-care bureaucracy.

Historically, this is how Congress has given away its power, and our freedom. Congress passes a law declaring some vague and laudatory goal—"environmental protection," say, or "clean air," or "occupational safety," or the relief of troubled assets—then Congress creates a vast new bureaucracy and leaves it to them to fill the Federal Register with tens of thousands of pages, year after year, specifying exactly how those goals are to be achieved.

That's why it's impossible to say exactly what any of this legislation actually does. It is impossible to predict whether the Clean Air Act will be used to regulate carbon dioxide, or whether the Troubled Asset Relief Program will do any of the half-dozen things it ended up doing after Hank Paulson decided that it wouldn't actually relieve us from any troubled assets.

So it's a mistake to think of the current legislation as a health-care reform bill. It is actually a bill for the formation of a massive health-care bureaucracy charged with the task of scheming endlessly to expand its own power.

The only way to prevent this kind of free-floating grant of power to the bureaucracy is to prevent it from forming in the first place, by keeping government out of medicine. It's far too late to keep the government out of medicine altogether, of course; the government has been "reforming" health-care for 60 years, and it has already taken over roughly half of the industry. If we want government out of health care, we'll need reform, all right—but in the opposite direction from the current bill. But for now, we can at least stop the government from encroaching any further.

If we don't, we can expect that every political battle over health-care from now on will be a rear-guard action to stop the new health-care bureaucracy from taking on an ever wider role, imposing new regulations and controls that were never specified or even dreamed of when the legislation was passed.

Advocates of liberty have been winning the current battle over health-care. The administration is making concessions, Blue Dogs are trying to mollify us, and some congressmen are so terrified that they can only be found on milk cartons this August.

It is time to press our advantage, keep up the pressure, and make it clear to our congressmen that we don't want a modified or watered down version of this health-care bill. We want no version of this health-care bill and no new health-care bureaucracy.