The single most important issue in this election is ending the national nightmare of Obamacare.

If Obamacare is not stopped, it will permanently change the political culture of this country. There will be no going back. America will become a less productive, less wealthy nation. What wealth remains will have to be plowed into Obamacare — to the delight only of the tens of thousands of government bureaucrats administering it.

There won’t be one moment marking the end of America. Everything will just gradually get worse, like trains and the tax code, until a bustling, prosperous nation is as distant a memory as pleasurable train travel and one-page tax returns.

The reason we have Obamacare is not because the public was clamoring for the federal government to take over health care. It’s because the Democrats had 60 senators. In the frozen ideology of the left, it doesn’t matter if anyone wants government health care.

Democrats had been waiting around for 50 years to win huge majorities in the House and Senate and the presidency, so they could check off this box on “FDR’s Unfinished Business.”

Unlike all other major legislation in the nation’s history, Obamacare was passed exclusively by one party that had just won an aberrationally large majority in Congress. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it.

Republicans have passed legislation on such partisan votes, too, but never something that would fundamentally change the lives of every living American. Nationalizing one-sixth of the economy is not the kind of thing that should be passed by one party sneering, “Ha, ha — we have 60 votes!”

As soon as all Americans have been thrown off their employer-provided insurance plans and are forced to start depending on the government for health care, Republicans will never be able to repeal it.

The private insurance market will be gone. Most Americans won’t be able to conceive of getting health care that doesn’t come from the government — just as people in the Soviet Union couldn’t imagine how they’d get bread if the government didn’t provide it.

(Also similar to Communist systems, you’ll have to know someone in power to get decent medical care.)

A powerful health care Leviathan will arise, composed of self-paced, well-pensioned, unionized government workers who will manage our health care from 10 a.m.-3 p.m., except federal holidays, sick days, mental health days and in bad weather. (The day after Hurricane Sandy, everything was open on the mostly unaffected Upper East Side of New York — but not the post office.)

This new phalanx of government workers will spend the bulk of their time campaigning to ensure the election of more Democrats who promise to lessen their workload and increase their benefits. Even Republicans will have to run for office promising only to enlarge Obamacare. Newt Gingrich will be calling plans to alter Obamacare “right-wing social engineering.”

The Democrats’ idea for funding their endless government programs is always the same: Tax the rich, and just keep taxing them, no matter how high taxes have to be raised. One thing all such people have in common is that they’ve never had a real job, meaning a job from which you can be fired. Not Bernie Sanders, not Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, not Chuck Schumer and on and on.

Such people simply cannot grasp that doubling tax rates will not double government revenues because people won’t work as hard for half the money. Their ideas about tax policy will put America on a high-speed train to government deficits rivaling Greece. We’ll be a country with no military, no wealth and no hope.

Even before the train wreck of Obamacare, health care was half-a-disaster because that’s the percentage of medical care in this country that was already provided by the government — via Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ hospitals and other public hospitals.

In 2008, a single county in Florida — Miami-Dade — received more money in Medicare home health care payments than the entire rest of the country combined. This continued throughout the entire year and was finally noticed by our Department of Health and Human Services in December 2009.

Do you think it would take a private insurer two years to catch onto the fact that health care claims coming from a single county in Florida were larger than the rest of the country combined?

Lifelong politicians haven’t the first idea what an efficient, operating system would even look like. If only we had a presidential candidate who had spent his life working in the private sector …

The way to fix health care is to take as much as possible away from the government and give it to the private sector. It is a universal law of nature that everything run by the government gets worse and more expensive over time — the postal service, airport security and Amtrak. Everything run by the private sector gets better and cheaper over time — cellphones, computers, hair products, dishwashers, etc.

You know who specializes in rescuing failing enterprises and making things work? Mitt Romney.

Contrary to ignorant slanders about Romney’s private sector work, his specialty was not buying thriving companies and stripping them for parts. Rather, the Bain Capital model was to take companies that were on the verge of collapse — about to cut all jobs, pensions and health care for their workers — and save the business.

Romney is the Red Adair of his profession. He’s like a doctor who specializes in multiple gunshot wounds or an oncologist who takes only Stage 4 cancer patients. Yes, there were layoffs, but also lots and lots of jobs, profit, success, efficiency, saved businesses and saved lives.

Romney will be the most accomplished incoming president since Dwight Eisenhower.

Not only has Romney promised to issue a 50-state waiver from Obamacare on his first day in office and then seek a formal repeal and replacement, but he’ll know how to do it. The savior of dying companies will fix health care in this country so that no Democrat will be able to wreck it again.

The only way to rid ourselves of this national poison pill, set to destroy both health care and the nation at large, is to elect Mitt Romney our next president.

Ann Coulter is a political commentator and author.