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Today we’re health care all the time. Mark Steyn explains the reason for the big push by the Dems.
So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
John Steele Gordon in Contentions writes on the year since the drive for health care “reform” was launched.
… “I just want to figure out what works,” Obama told them.
Too bad he didn’t do that. Instead he turned everything over to the ultraliberal Pooh-Bahs of Congress, who produced a bill (or rather two bills, one in the House the other in the Senate) the unpopularity of which has only grown with time. That Obama wanted everything wrapped up by last year’s August recess now seems a long-ago bad joke.
Today there is certainly still a call coming from the bottom up. Unfortunately for the Democrats, it’s an ever-rising groundswell of opposition to ObamaCare, one that threatens to become a political hurricane that could sweep the Democrats out of the majority in both houses of Congress and render the president politically impotent for the rest of his term. …
Charles Krauthammer comments on the Obamacare death march.
…Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health-care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.
Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.
Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down, and the bill doesn’t do it. Buffett’s advice would be to start over and get it right with a bill that says “we’re just going to focus on costs and we’re not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things.” …
The WSJ editors review Paul Ryan’s teachable moment with Obama at the healthcare summit, featured here last Monday.
…Nearby, we reprint Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s remarks at the health summit last week, which methodically dismantle the falsehoods—there is no other way of putting it—that Mr. Obama has used to sell “reform” and repeated again yesterday. No one in the political class has even tried to refute Mr. Ryan’s arguments, though he made them directly to the President and his allies, no doubt because they are irrefutable. If Democrats are willing to ignore overwhelming public opposition to ObamaCare and pass it anyway, then what’s a trifling dispute over a couple of trillion dollars? …
…Mr. Obama’s fiscal assertions are possible only because of the fraudulent accounting and budget gimmicks that Democrats spent months calibrating. Readers can find the gory details in Mr. Ryan’s pre-emptive rebuttal nearby, though one of the most egregious deceptions is that the bill counts 10 years of taxes but only six years of spending. …
…The President was (miraculously) struck dumb by Mr. Ryan’s critique, and in his response drifted off into an irrelevant tangent about Medicare Advantage…
In the Corner, Jeffrey Anderson says to call your congressman now if you don’t want Obamacare. He explains why:
All of the talk about “reconciliation” seems to have distracted people — like a red herring — from a simple but crucial fact: If the House goes first, as now appears to be the plan, and passes the Senate health-care overhaul, the president would then have a bill in hand that had passed both houses of Congress, and — whether reconciliation subsequently succeeded or failed in the Senate — we would have Obamacare.
Reconciliation would then be like the exhibition ice skating in the Olympics after the medals have been awarded: interesting to some, but wholly irrelevant to anything that really matters.
The attention is on the Senate, but the battle is in the House. It’s time for Americans from coast to coast to communicate their clear desires to their congressmen. If Americans don’t want Obamacare — and every indication is that they emphatically don’t — now is the time for swing-district Democrats to hear that full chorus of opposition: loudly, clearly, and forcibly.
Rich Lowry agrees with Jeffrey Anderson’s assessment. If the House passes the Senate version, Obamacare can be signed into law.
This is an important point. I don’t think people understand that reconciliation isn’t really that important except as a promise to members of the House. Even Charles Krauthammer, if I understood him correctly, said last night that he thinks the bill will pass the House but fail during the reconciliation process. But if the bill passes the House, the same bill has passed the Senate and the House and Obama can just sign the thing. It won’t matter if the reconciliation process bogs down, except to those Democrats who thought the bill would be “fixed.” But once they’ve voted, they’ve voted. Obama can say, “See you in the Rose Garden and we’ll try to fix it next year.” Jeffrey Anderson makes this point here. …
Also in the Corner, Yuval Levin clarifies how the Democrat leadership in the House is trying to persuade congressmen.
It’s worth reiterating something Rich and Jeff Anderson have pointed out: The focus on reconciliation in the past few days confuses things a bit. The question in the health-care debate at the moment is whether Nancy Pelosi can get enough of her members to vote for the version of Obamacare that passed the Senate late last year. If the House passes that bill, it will have passed both houses, will go to the president, and will become law.
Some liberal House Democrats have problems with that bill — especially with some of its tax provisions, though also a few other things. So to get some of their votes, the leadership is now telling them that if they vote for the Senate bill, the House could then pass another bill that amends the Senate bill to fix some of what they don’t like about it. The Senate could then pass that amendment bill by reconciliation and it would also become law, and so the sum of the two laws would be closer to what they want.
But that amending bill wouldn’t change the basic character of what would be enacted (and to the extent it would change it at the edges, it would be mostly for the worse): Either way, if the House passes the Senate bill then Obamacare would become law, complete with its massive, overbearing, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended to replace the American health-insurance industry with an enormous federal entitlement while failing to address the problem of costs. Just about everything the public hates about the bill is in both versions. The prospect of reconciliation is just one of the means that the Democratic leadership is employing to persuade members of the House to ignore the public’s wishes and their own political future and enact Obamacare.
The fate of Obamacare therefore now rests not in the Senate but in the House. It is members of the House who must decide if it will be enacted, and it needs to be clear to voters exactly where their opposition to the Democrats’ approach to health care should be focused now.
Yuval Levin also blogs about Georgia Congressman Nathan Deal, who is resigning. Deal decided to remain in the House long enough to vote against Obamacare.
Republican Congressman Nathan Deal of Georgia announced last week that he would resign from the House on March 8, to devote his time to running for governor. His departure would have meant that House Democrats only needed 216 votes, rather than 217, to pass their health-care bill. But Deal has just announced that he has decided to stay in Congress until the end of the month, which would be after the Democrats’ self-imposed deadline for passing the bill (and would take them into the Easter recess, when members must again confront constituents, and which Speaker Pelosi therefore very much wants to avoid). He was not coy about the reason for his decision:
“Yesterday, as I listened to President Obama’s aggressive push for a quick vote on ‘Obama-Care,’ it was clear that I must stay in Congress and continue to fight against the most liberal health care agenda ever proposed.”
That makes Pelosi’s job just a little bit harder.
And Daniel Foster, in the Corner, updates a few more votes that the Dems may not have.
More bad news for Pelosi. Greg Sargent reports that Rep. Frank Kratovil (D., Md.), who voted ‘no’ on the first bill and was hitherto thought of as undecided on the Senate bill, has confirmed he will now vote no.
Also, freshman Rep. Kurt Schrader (D., Ore.), another ‘yes’ on the first bill, is now undecided.
Jennifer Rubin draws some conclusions about what is happening with the liberals over Obamacare.
Greg Sargent observes:
One possible scenario that reform proponents dread is that Congress fails to pass reform before the Easter break — leaving Congressional Dems in the position of returning to their constituents empty-handed, just as they did over last summer’s recess. In the Capitol just now, a top spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi refused to endorse the White House’s preferred timetable for passing reform. Yesterday Robert Gibbs declared, perhaps unrealistically, that the White House would like the House to pass the Senate bill by March 18th, before the President goes abroad.
There are a few points worth noting. First, it’s quite obvious that Pelosi is a long way from getting her votes lined up. There is no reason to drag this out, unless, of course, Pelosi still can’t put together a majority. Jake Tapper has been keeping an unofficial whip count and there is far more bad news than good news for Pelosi, as the no’s are hardening and previous supporters are turning undecided. Second, the underlying problem, as it was last year, is that their members need to be kept as far from the voters as possible. Send them back home with the vote still pending and they risk an avalanche of opposition. Not in recent memory (or ever?) can I recall congressional leaders so wary of their members’ encounter with the electorate. That alone should tell those wavering members something. …
In the Weekly Standard Blog, Matthew Continetti posts on Congressman Paul Ryan.
This is Paul Ryan’s moment. If national security or social policy were at the center of debate, the Wisconsin congressman wouldn’t be nearly as prominent as he is today. But President Obama wants to reshape the American economy and welfare state so that it looks more like a Western European social democracy. And since fiscal policy is Ryan’s specialty, he’s become the GOP point man when it comes to entitlements and health care. I continue to get emails from readers applauding Ryan’s performance at the health care summit a week ago. Type Ryan’s name into Google search and the fifth prompt that comes up is “Paul Ryan for President.” (Ryan says he won’t run in 2012.)
In other entitlement news, Ryan recently published a Politico Ideas piece on America’s looming fiscal crisis. And Newsweek’s website featured Reason’s Peter Suderman’s take on Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future.
Then there’s health care reform. Ryan’s deconstruction of the claim that Obamacare reduces the deficit has become a minor YouTube classic. …
David Harsanyi is concerned that if Obamacare passes, Republicans will never have the courage to repeal it. Harsanyi brings up a valid concern, given the bipartisan spending spree that the government has been on.
…Remember that Congress estimated Medicare’s cost at $12 billion for 1990 (adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost $107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion. Who’s going to stop it?
The template is used over and over again. Government is a growth industry. …
Thomas Sowell discusses some of the economic issues behind the rising costs of healthcare.
…What is the biggest complaint about the current medical care situation? “It costs too much.” Yet one looks in vain for anything in the pending legislation that will lower those costs.
One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians’ answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government.
Back when the “single payer” was the patient, people were more selective in what they spent their own money on. You went to a doctor when you had a broken leg but not necessarily every time you had the sniffles or a skin rash. But, when someone else is paying, that is when medical care gets over-used — and bureaucratic rationing is then imposed, to replace self-rationing. …
…Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen. …
Thomas Sowell also looks at some simple ways that healthcare costs could be lowered, and government power could be decreased.
…If medical insurance simply covered risks — which is what insurance is all about — that would be far less expensive than covering completely predictable things like annual checkups. Far more people could afford medical insurance, thereby reducing the ranks of the uninsured.
But all the political incentives are for politicians to create mandates forcing insurance companies to cover an ever increasing range of treatments, and thereby forcing those who buy insurance to pay ever higher premiums to cover the costs of these mandates.
…One of the ways of reducing the costs of medical insurance would be to pass federal legislation putting an end to state regulation of insurance companies. That would instantly eliminate thousands of state mandates, which force insurance to cover everything from wigs to marriage counseling, depending on which special interests are influential in which states.
It would also promote nationwide competition among insurance companies — and competition keeps prices down better than politicians will. Moreover, competition can bring down the costs behind the prices, in part by forcing less efficient insurance companies out of business. …
Thomas Sowell completes his hat trick on medical care.
… If medical insurance simply covered risks — which is what insurance is all about — that would be far less expensive than covering completely predictable things like annual checkups. Far more people could afford medical insurance, thereby reducing the ranks of the uninsured.
But all the political incentives are for politicians to create mandates forcing insurance companies to cover an ever increasing range of treatments, and thereby forcing those who buy insurance to pay ever higher premiums to cover the costs of these mandates.
That way, politicians can play Santa Claus and make insurance companies play Scrooge. It is great political theater. Politicians who are pushing for a government-controlled medical care system say that it will “keep insurance companies honest.” The very idea of politicians keeping other people honest ought to tell us what a farce this is. But if we keep buying it, they will keep selling it. …