Soak the rich to pay for universal health care - extreme liberal agenda pretty much laid bare with that idea: rich don't deserve what they have so lets take it from them for the sake of utopian egalitarianism, otherwise known as the consolation of mediocrity, otherwise known as socialism. I have no illusions concerning the merits of the rich - as I have no illusions concerning the merits of the middle class or the poor or any other strata populating this provisional excrescence called society. Some people are worthy, most are of marginal relevance, a great many are virtually useless. The fundamental difference between the ideology of socialism and the practice of capitalism is that socialism wants to believe that people are essentially good and deserving whereas capitalism tends to act as if people are essentially weak and unreliable. Extremes of both are bad and will end with tyrannies of various orders - but as reality forces things to the middle only capitalism retains its vitality because its inherent realism makes it the most adaptable to and accommodating of exigent circumstances which amount to what we generally call life, which is why it has been so successful: socialism withers under the constraints of a delimiting, unrealistic dogma.
Of course it could just simply be a case of democrats behaving like cutthroat opportunists [you mean like capitalists?] by offering government controlled universal care for the purposes of binding a shit load of voters to them in perpetuity. Still, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... is it a socialist?
