Back in August 2009, Bill Clinton pled with Democrats not to lose their nerve and let a health-care bill die. He offered two comforting predictions:
I’m telling you no matter how low [Republicans] drive support for this with misinformation, the minute the president signs a health care reform bill his approval will go up. Secondly, within a year, when all those bad things they say will happen don’t happen, and all the good things happen, approval will explode.
What seems about to explode, in 49 days, is the same cigar that blew up in the Democrats’ face when they tried this in 1994. Back then it was simply a failed attempt, planned in secret by the president’s wife and a committee of experts; this time it was legislation, rammed through on a party-line vote, by legislators who six months after are unwilling to advertise their “historic” vote. The electorate seems considerably more angry this year.
The public instinctively knew that the endlessly-repeated promises about ObamaCare — it would be deficit-neutral; not affect those satisfied with their existing plans; not limit the quality or availability of medical care; and not produce (in Bill Clinton’s terms) any “bad things” but only “good things” — were false assurances. But the public was constantly told that CBO projections showed ObamaCare would reduce the deficit — and who were you gonna believe, the CBO or the Republicans’ “misinformation”?
In “Health Care: The Disquieting Truth” in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Arnold Relman, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, writes that:
The seemingly optimistic reports of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which were important in supporting the Democrats’ legislative proposals, should not be misunderstood. The deficit reduction predicted by the CBO referred to covering only the added costs of the legislation for the first ten years, not to the likelihood of stemming the continuously rising costs of existing federal programs.
Relman further notes that the CBO was concerned only with the federal budget, not state budgets or the financial condition of the entire public and private health-care system, which, he concludes, seems headed toward bankruptcy. He ends by describing a new study predicting ObamaCare will, in fact, add $562 billion to the federal deficit in the first ten years.
It is clear from Relman’s article that the Obama administration’s approach to health care is the same it adopted with respect to the budget. In the latter case, it massively increased spending — and is now arguing that a huge increase in taxes is necessary to cure the resulting “unsustainable” deficits. In the former, it pushed through changes and mandates that will dramatically increase health-care costs — and will next argue that health care must be government-controlled to cure the coming cost crisis.
Relman’s own cure is a dramatic restriction or elimination of private insurance and imposition of more government regulation and health care — which he says would “undoubtedly” result in “huge savings” while “making medical care more efficient and effective” at the same time. His approach would apparently produce only good things and not bad things.
