I am writing today not just as an independent health insurance agent, but also as a concerned American citizen. The topic, as it has been for several weeks, is the health care insurance debate taking place not just in Washington but across the United States. Today, voters are going to the polls in Massachusetts in part to weigh in on this issue that will affect every citizen and resident alien in the country.

I don’t know what the outcome of today’s election will be or what message the pundits and politicians will take from it. What concerns me is that the White House will not care one way or another. President Obama’s senior advisor, David Axelrod, made this clear in an article in the Washington Post entitled “Senate election in Massachusetts could be harbinger for health-care reform.” Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza quote Axelrod as saying, “The only way to win this debate is to get the bill passed and implement it.”

This is a stunning remark. In fact, I consider it to be the most outrageous and sinister statement made by an official of our government in my lifetime. I am not being hyperbolic. Let me explain.

First, Axelrod is admitting that supporters of health care insurance reform have failed to win popular support. Polls indicate that the number of people who support the president’s health insurance reform initiative is just over a third of voters—about 35 percent.

Nor is Axelrod optimistic about turning those numbers around. In fact, the longer the debate lasts, the worse health insurance reform legislation fares. What we are seeing is a replay of the 1993 health insurance debate: The more people learn about what the legislation will entail, the less they like it. That is their right, of course. That is why we have debates. When it comes to public policy, especially policy that touches every person’s life, the devil really is in the details.

Many ideas that sound wonderful in the abstract become unpopular or even repugnant when transmogrified into rules, regulations, restrictions, and taxes. Universal healthcare is the ultimate example of this phenomenon.

Universal health care is not a new idea. It is an idea that has been tested in the court of public opinion for more than one hundred years, and it has lost every time. Supporters of health insurance reform claim that an evil cabal manages to torpedo the legislation every time it comes up. As a writer to the editorial page of the New York Times recently put it, “A powerful economic minority in this country wants to deny the people a basic human right: health care.” That letter writer has it exactly backwards. Believing that their businesses would be hurt more by opposing health insurance reform legislation than by working with the government to create a feasible plan, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies initially supported health insurance reform. It is the majority of the people—the little guys—who have rebelled against this legislation, as they did in 1993 and every time it has been seriously entertained.

This is what frustrates Axelrod. He believes that he, President Obama, and the Democratic majority in Congress know better than the American people. They believe they are right, even if they can’t persuade the voters that they are. The people, Axelrod believes, are too stupid to know what is good for them. The only way to “persuade” them is to impose the program on them. Once it is in place, the people will learn to love it.

The arrogance of this belief is breathtaking. So is its resemblance to a dictatorship. All dictators believe they are smarter than everyone else, and that everyone will see the wisdom of their policies once they live under them for awhile. King George III thought he had all the answers, too, but our forefathers fought a bloody Revolutionary War to establish the principle that governments can rule only by consent of the governed. In America, we are less interested in end results than we are the process. The American people sometimes get things wrong, but at least we rule ourselves. If we lose the right of self-determination, then we have lost everything.

That is what makes Axelrod’s statement so pernicious. It is antithetical to the democratic principles on which this country is founded. His statement is something you would expect to hear in the presidential palace of a banana republic, not in the White House.

Finally, Axelrod’s statement is self-negating and illogical. Passing health insurance reform legislation without popular support and implementing it against the will of the people is not “winning” the debate. It is losing the debate and not caring. It is losing the debate and forging ahead. It is saying you don’t care about persuasion or politics, only power. It is small-minded, regressive, brutish. And that is frightening.