Scott Spiegel

Supporters of the Democrats’ health care bill offer the following take on Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha “Kennedy” Coakley, a plea they hope will draw on voters’ sense of fairness and magnanimity:

If Brown wins, the health care bill will not be passed.  It is a terrible shame that something this nation has frittered away a year debating and Congress has spent a year drafting, something that may not get another chance again—if at all—for a whole generation, could be dismantled because of the obstinacy of one man who wins a special election in a tiny state.  Brown may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

As if it will do any good, here’s a point-by-point rebuttal of this selfless appeal by Democrats to our leftist instincts:

(1) The point of a debate is to have two sides present their cases and see which makes the better argument.  The outcome is not predetermined, much as Democrats would like it to be and have tried to make it so.  Republicans spoke, Democrats spoke, and the American people made up their minds: Republicans won.

(2) The fact that we spent a year debating this horrendous bill, in all its myriad forms, is indeed deplorable, when we could have been talking about how to encourage the Iranian protestors, win in Afghanistan, or abolish the Department of Education.  But just because gallons of ink have been spilled and billions of megabytes have been transmitted and trillions of cubic feet of C02 have been exhaled thrashing out numerous claims made by Democrats and debunked by Republicans, doesn’t mean we have to embrace the fallacy of sunken costs and pass something that stinks just to rationalize our squandered effort.

Making a $100 down payment on a $1,000 dishwasher offered by a fraudulent mail-order company that folds does not obligate us to send the company the other $900 so our first $100 isn’t wasted.  If any Democrats want to silently change their positions on the bill and pretend they felt that way all along, I promise you that Republicans will be tactful enough to go along with the charade.

(3) If it isn’t right to pass this legislation in the current generation, just as it wasn’t right to pass it in Hillary Clinton’s generation, or Truman’s generation, or FDR’s generation, then we can afford to wait at least another generation to debate it again, if liberals really insist on holding and losing this contest once more.

(4) Saying that the special election in Massachusetts could destroy the whole health care plan is like saying that the failure of an asteroid to demolish the court building where Bernard Madoff was sentenced destroyed his chance for freedom.  The success of this health care bill has been dangling like an anvil from a spider web since last summer.  The special election in Massachusetts is only the latest in many gusts of wind to threaten to crash the Democrats’ hopes to the ground.

(5) Saying that the travesty of Democrats’ health care bill not passing is due to Scott Brown’s stubbornness upon being elected is like saying that the travesty of Confederate soldiers’ dying is due to Abraham Lincoln’s stubbornness upon being elected.  In addition to its being the right course of action, if Brown wins and votes no on the bill, it will be because he was explicitly elected for that purpose alone, to take that specific action by itself.  Indeed, he barely had to say a word about any of the other issues in order to win fanatical political and financial support from Republicans, Independents, and Democrats in Massachusetts and across the country.

Promising to kill the health care bill is not just the biggest, but the only functional plank in Brown’s platform.  Senator Brown could turn around next month and introduce a bill using Medicare funds to subsidize partial-birth abortions for illegal Islamist immigrant tax cheats with Al-Qaeda ties, and he would still be Republicans’ hero for having voted down the health care bill.

(6) If Obama isn’t buried under a pile of political debris after his dustup with the 41st Senator, and dares to try to foist cap-and-trade, Stimulus II, or other reckless spending debacles onto a battered and bruised Congress, he will find it even harder to pass such legislation than he did the health care bill, and that is saying something.  Indeed, one of the fringe benefits of voting for Brown is that he will block not only the health care bill but anything like it that comes down the chute.

As an opponent of the health care bill, here’s my take on Tuesday’s election, which I hope will appeal to any remaining connection to reality liberals may have:

Even if Brown loses, the health care bill still will not be passed.  There are too many gaping discrepancies between the two versions of the bill to be reconciled; Blue Dog Democrats are too nervous about their own reelection campaigns this fall; and soon-to-be-elected Republican majorities in the House and Senate will do everything in their power to reverse any steps taken to enact this wretched bill.

They may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

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Each of the two ratified versions of the health care bill currently waiting in Congress was barely passed, by virtually the slimmest margin possible, in a hectic last-minute stampede.  Dozens of harsh compromises had to be hammered out to cobble together the fragile framework now standing in each chamber.

The two bills are like delicate Jenga towers, swaying nerve-wrackingly in the breeze, that must now be reassembled by a team of 535 clumsy attention-seekers into a tower twice as tall.  But legislators across the two chambers—and even within them—are not even speaking the same language.

Here are a few of the myriad discrepancies legislators must reconcile to ensure that their monument to Obama’s greatness doesn’t fall:

In the House version of the bill, a government-run insurance exchange is created on a national level and includes a public option.  In the Senate version, exchanges are created on the state level and do not include a public option.  Virtually identical!

The House completely bans the practice 0f charging those with preexisting conditions higher premiums.  The Senate allows insurers to offer unlimited discounts for customers who engage in subjectively defined wellness activities: say, exercising, eating healthy, “not having contracted lung cancer”…

Insurance exchanges are implemented in 2013 in the House bill and 2014 in the Senate bill.

In the House version, employers are forced to provide insurance for their employees and pay a fine if they do not.  In the Senate version, employers are not required to provide insurance, but pay a fine for employees who opt for government-run insurance and receive federal subsidies.  The House has higher penalties than the Senate.

The House version funds the bill by imposing a surtax on families making over $1 million a year.  The Senate version establishes a tax on those with “Cadillac” plans, which includes not only many union members, but millions of families who will unexpectedly find themselves unlucky Cadillac owners over the next 10 years due to the non-inflation-adjusted nature of the provision.

The House version does not tax insurance offered by employers; the Senate version taxes employer insurance above a threshold.

The House version charges older people a maximum of twice the premiums as younger people; the Senate version sets a maximum ratio of three-to-one.  The House offers fewer insurance subsidies for the middle class than does the Senate.  The Senate offers weaker measures to limit out-of-pocket costs than does the House.

The House bill covers 5 million more people than the Senate bill by expanding Medicaid to those earning up to about $2,000 more than in the Senate bill.

The Senate version gives $100 million to Nebraska for indefinite coverage of all new Medicaid enrollees in the state (to buy Ben Nelson’s vote).  The Senate bill gives $300 million to Louisiana for Medicare increases (for Mary Landrieu’s vote); $10 billion to Vermont for new public health centers (for Bernie Sanders’ vote); billions to Nebraska and Michigan to waive nonprofit insurers’ excise taxes (for Ben Nelson and Carl Levin’s votes); millions to Massachusetts and Vermont for Medicaid; and millions to Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania for Medicare Advantage.  None of these provisions is in the House bill.

The Senate version includes, per the insistence of construction unions, an important exception to the employer mandate.  As an article in the New York Times titled “In Health Bill for Everyone, Provisions for a Few” reports, “Under the Senate bill, businesses with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt from the penalties in every industry but construction.”  In the construction industry, the mandate holds for employers with as few as 5 employees.  The House includes no such provision.

Restrictions on abortion funding are tight in the House, with no federal funding allowed; and loose in the Senate, with mere separation of federal and private money, and states allowed to make up whatever rules they want regarding abortion funding.

Coverage for illegal immigrants is not disallowed in the House; it is explicitly banned in the Senate.

It should be sobering for Democrats to realize that if just one Senator or two Representatives decide they can’t tolerate the alternative version of even one of these provisions, that will be enough to topple the whole health care reform edifice.

It’s no wonder, then, that Congressional Democrats now plan to merge the bills behind closed doors, shutting out all Republicans from discussion of the reconciliation process and preventing them from using parliamentary procedures to slow consideration of the bill and allow the public to digest the proposed changes.  Talking Points Memo cites one Democratic House aide who proudly admits, “This process cuts out the Republicans.”  The House will simply take the Senate’s bill, amend it, vote on it, and send it to the Senate; who will then amend the bill, vote on it, and send it to the House; and back and forth until some hideous, lopsided, structurally unsound blueprint garners enough votes in both chambers.

If Democrats had to merge these two bills in a public conference committee—never mind on C-SPAN, as previously promised and recently offered by the network’s CEO—it would take about five minutes for the cacophonous clatter surrounding their health care Tower of Babel to bring it crashing down.

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In their quest to pass health care reform legislation, Democrats have been cheating death, robbing Peter to pay Paul, taking candy from babies, lying through their teeth, moving the goalposts, and burning the candle at both ends.  It is all about to catch up with them.

If I were an editorial cartoonist, I’d depict Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as Tarzan and Jane, swinging through the forest, dangling a ragtag bundle of Congressional Democrats in a net trap, eking their way from one tree to the next as each vine snaps behind them, nearly sending them to their death in the jaws of lions below.

Here are a few of the nine lives Congressional Democrats have used up in recent months:

(1)    The House version of the health care bill passed in a squeaker of a vote, 220-215, three weeks ago.  Two Democrats voting the other way would have killed the bill (not 3, since Republican Representative Joseph Cao cast his vote for the bill only once he was sure it would pass without him).

(2)    The Senate agreed to begin debate on its version of the bill in another squeaker of a vote this weekend, which was preceded by a $300,000,000 payoff to Senator Landrieu for her state of Louisiana (thanks for the revised figure, Mary!).  As Dana Milbank noted, this sum is 20 times the price of the original Louisiana Purchase, which bought us 14 states.  As The New York Post observed, based on Louisiana Representative William Jefferson’s recent 13-year sentence for accepting a $100,000 bribe, Landrieu should spend the next 39,000 years in jail.

(3)    Pelosi violated her pledge to post the final version of any legislation online for 72 hours.  Instead, she and Reid have been finishing their handiwork on Friday night and ramming through their votes on Saturday night.  Defeating these bills would be hard enough if the public had time to digest them and hold politicians accountable for supporting them, but now congressmen can claim that they were unaware of ornery provisions slipped in at the last minute, because they were unable to speed-read 300 pages of legalese an hour.

(4)    Leaders of both houses have been inserting, modifying, watering down, or removing passages to get approval for the bill or beginning debate, when they know full well that crucial blocs of defectors will never vote for current legislation in the final vote.  These holdouts will demand that all changes be unmade, which will cause even larger chunks of the Democrats’ fragile majorities to drift away.  For example, Pelosi banned federal funding of abortion in the House bill, a restriction that a dozen representatives will never accept in the final bill.  Reid reinserted in the Senate bill a public option, which had been absent from all committee versions, when he knows that every Republican and at least four Democrats would filibuster a vote on such a bill.

(5)    Reid bought holdout votes from centrist Democrats by making minor concessions tailored to their districts’ concerns.  To support the final bill, these and other Democrats are demanding much bigger concessions, which conflict with each other and with demands made by those in the House.  It is not physically possible to satisfy all of these lawmakers’ requirements at once, which is why Reid and Pelosi have barely been able to do it with 12 different versions of the bill over a period of several months.

(6)    Democrats are willing to slash funding for Medicare, which Jay Cost calls “the most significant fiscal policy ‘achievement’ of the Democratic Party in the last seventy years” [scare quotes mine].  Doing so has cost them the support of seniors, who oppose the bill even more comprehensively than the general public.

(7)    Rasmussen reported on Monday that support for the bill has fallen to a new low of 38%.  Some Senators have been jeopardizing their reelection in 2010 by their support for their bill, and at least one—junior Senator Michael Bennet—has been bragging about it.

(8)    Senator Chuck Schumer is now resorting to bald-faced threats, which should go over wonderfully with the public; recently he declared on behalf of all of Congress, “We’re not going to not pass a bill.”

All of this is already starting to take its toll on Democrats: witness the retreat of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, who voted not to allow debate on Reid’s bill to proceed, when formerly she had been trumpeted as giving the bill a bipartisan veneer by supporting the Senate Finance Committee’s version.  Democrats think they can pass a bill by tossing concessions left and right to keep the ball rolling through each stage, but their momentum is eventually going to grind to a halt.

On a more general note, anyone trying to do something impossible—in this case, have government take over a sixth of the economy and provide better, more widespread care at lower costs than the private sector, with no sacrifices required from anyone—necessarily fights a harder battle than his opponents, because reality is not on his side.  Republicans, as ineffective and mealy-mouthed as some of them have been in making the case against Congress’s bill, possess the inherent advantage of the truth.  The American people and a vigilant alternative media can discover the truth if no one else will.

Congressional Democrats up for reelection next year for one of 535 seats are about to experience a whole new type of rationing.

The Democrats’ health care legislation, as is or in very similar form, cannot be passed.  Every choice point they encounter from this stage on leads to an internal contradiction or a dead end.  To use a mathematical metaphor, their situation is overdetermined: there are too many conflicting restrictions; there is no solution to their dilemma.  (To use a liberal metaphor: It’s a slam dunk!)

Democratic proponents of health care reform have the following major goals:

(1)    Create a federal public health insurance option to “compete with” private insurers, or

(2)    Set up state cooperatives to “compete with” private insurers on a state-by-state basis;

(3)    Prevent discrimination by insurance companies based on preexisting condition—i.e., forbid insurance companies from “providing insurance”;

(4)    Limit the ratio of high-to-low insurance premiums by age group.

Whether pursuing any of these goals is the government’s business—and it isn’t—Democrats need to enact some combination of these proposals in order to fulfill their aim of turning us into Canada; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this will cost about $1 trillion.

Democrats have proposed numerous bad ideas for paying for their legislation, all of which lead to intractable circumstances that they cannot tolerate politically with the general electorate, even if they were able to figure out a way to cobble together, rush through, or force the votes in Congress to pass them.  These funding ideas include:

(1)    Increase the deficit: This would violate Obama’s promise that health care reform will be “dime”-neutral.

(2)    Make taxpayers subsidize the public option: This would keep the government plan from having to cut costs or be efficient to attract and retain customers, as any private insurance company must.  It would therefore eventually force those who are satisfied with their current plans to pay higher premiums or get less for their money.

(3)    Cut $500 billion in Medicare: This would upset seniors, and anyone who plans to be a senior at some point in his life, who fear rationing of care.

(4)    Tax high-cost plans at a 40% rate: This would anger emergency workers and union members, and huge numbers of people who will hit the non-insurance-adjusted premium threshold for this level of taxation in the next 10 years.

(5)    Impose fees on insurance and pharmaceutical companies: These costs would simply be passed on to doctors, who would in turn dump them on to patients.

(6)    Cap deductions for health savings accounts: This would increase out-of-pocket medical expenses.

(7)    Force everyone to buy government-approved health insurance by charging a penalty for not having coverage: If the penalty were low, in order to avoid making it burdensome, then people would wait to get coverage until they became sick, then drop coverage after they recovered, which means the penalty would be useless.  If the penalty were high, in order to make it effective, then the public would be infuriated over the imposition of a costly penalty for not buying something that should be optional.

(8)    Cover fewer uninsured people: This would involve turning the nation’s health care system upside down while failing to fulfill the basic aim of the plan.

In case Democrats are interested, there are provisions to which they could agree, all previously proposed in legislation by House Republicans, which would actually pay for the proposed plan.  These steps should be taken anyway, and should be pursued instead of the Democrats’ aims, but just for the record, they include:

(1)    Medical liability tort reform: This would reduce settlement amounts and lower doctors’ malpractice insurance premiums.

(2)    Tax deductions for health insurance premiums, medical expenses, and prescriptions: This would allow people to decide how to allocate their earnings toward medical expenses, which they can do more efficiently than Kathleen “Jolly Roger” Sebelius.

(3)    Vouchers for opting out of Medicare: This would allow people to decide how to spend their money on medical care in old age.

(4)    Interstate provision of private insurance: This would allow for greater competition and cost-cutting.

Despite conservatives’ nail-biting uncertainty over their ability to defeat HR 3200, they have one advantage: the truth.  All the arguments conservatives have advanced against liberals’ bad ideas are informed by it, whereas liberals must disguise it, distort it, downplay it, or lie about it to persuade anyone that their impossible legislative feat and fevered social engineering fantasy can be achieved.  There are plenty of voters and legislators who are content to ignore the truth and stumble down dead ends, but enough may turn out to be smart and honest enough to see through these efforts and find their way out of the labyrinth.

Thanks to fierce lobbying by Congressional Democrats, the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the health care bill just passed on Tuesday with bipartisan support from (1) liberal senators, represented by Olympia Snowe from Maine, and (2) ultraliberal senators, represented by all 13 Democrats on the committee.

On Wednesday morning, GOP senator and fellow Pine Stater Susan Collins also announced that she was open to health care reform along the lines of the committee’s proposal.

Impressive as this Republican sweep is, you may recall how Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package received even broader bipartisan support last spring, inasmuch as it attracted the votes of no fewer than three Republican senators, including Snowe, Collins, and Arlen Specter, which of course means that the failure of the stimulus bill to do anything it was supposed to lies equally with Democrats and Republicans.  (Of course, Specter became a Democrat five minutes later, but right up until that moment he was planted firmly on the other side of the aisle.)

Snowe, like Collins, Specter, John McCain, and other liberal senators, has a reputation for magnanimously cooperating with the opposition party (the ultraliberals) in passing legislation that might otherwise abridge our liberty.  Legislators such as Snowe (L-ME) serve the valuable function of watering down such legislation to render its impact marginally less onerous on average Americans.

For example, Snowe opposes a “public option” in the health care reform bill—that is, unless private insurance companies don’t live up to arbitrary standards to be issued by the Secretary of Health and Human Services that will ensure such companies don’t get away with swindles like “earning a profit,” at which point the public option will kick in faster than you can say “single payer.”

It’s a shame that no other Republican congressmen will put aside their partisan differences and work with liberal and ultraliberal senators.  (Imagine how Obama would trumpet the expansive consensus of a tripartisan bill!)  As is, even some liberal senators such as Independent Joe Lieberman have expressed resistance to embracing the proposed legislation on the grounds that it will massively increase health insurance premiums for Americans—i.e., that it is self-defeating and crazy.

Some might quibble that the mere addition of one senator to a committee vote does not indicate the establishment of bipartisanship on health care.  Yet Snowe’s vote must signify a major shepherding of Republicans into the fold, in that Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has made a host of concessions on her behalf, such as slashing by 50% the penalty for individuals who don’t buy insurance, and increasing subsidies to people whom the bill mandates must purchase insurance (i.e., everyone).  Never mind that the tiny state of Maine receives the same number of votes in the Senate as California—Snowe’s Finance Committee vote is evidently equal to the vote of 13 Democrat Senators!

The mainstream media’s critical, analytical take on this latest development on health care has been: a hearty rah! rah! for health care reformers for clearing such a grueling hurdle in such a graceful fashion.

While we’re talking about hurdles, it’s instructive to peruse an internal memo released by the Finance Committee in early June, which proposed a timetable for moving legislation through Congress.  According to this starry-eyed agenda, the Committee would pass its bill by mid-July, merge it with the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s wildly different bill and send it to the Senate floor for a vote by the end of July, and merge this with the House’s even more wildly different bill and have legislation ready for Obama to sign by October 1.

So the initial round of passing the bill out of committee, the slam-dunk part of the process, was supposed to take a month—and took four.  The next two rounds—merging the Senate bills, then merging the merged Senate bill with the merged House bill—will be far trickier than the initial round.  These tasks are predicted to take two-and-a-half months—by the same people who were confident Obama would have already signed a health care reform bill two weeks ago.  Based on the Committee’s previous underestimates, by my calculation Congress should get around to voting on a final healthcare bill around September 2010—two months before a third of the Senate and all of the House are up for reelection by a public that opposes every plan they’ve seen out of Congress this year.

Now that the Democrats have secured wide-ranging approval among lawmakers for their bill, I recommend that they capitalize on this groundswell of support.  Let’s hope that ultraliberals can leverage the runaway momentum created by bipartisanship from the Snowe Party to ensure swift passage of their bill.

In the event that the imminent failure of Democrats’ socialized medicine bill leads them to some soul-searching—perhaps listening to what their constituents have been telling them all summer, or taking GOP advice to start from scratch—it’s worth noting that House Republicans have introduced 32 health care reform bills since the spring, all languishing in the referral stage.

Many of these lonely bills deal with just one or several aspects of health care reform, rather than offering grand, sweeping Ten-Year Plans that will change Health Care As We Know It.  Not all the bills are knockouts; a couple are downright stinkers.  But virtually all contain some good ideas, and some of them contain nothing but good ideas—which means that no Democrat will ever for a moment consider any of them.

For those desiring ammunition to counterattack the liberal slander that conservatives criticize everything on health care they hear from Democrats but have no ideas of their own, here’s a primer on the legislation prepared by our devoted GOP servants in the House:

•    Several bills are flat-out winners, including Clifford Stearns’ Health Care Tax Deduction Act, Michele Bachmann’s Health Care Freedom of Choice Act, and Rodney Alexander’s Sunset of Life Protection Act.  These laws provide for income tax deductions of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs; medical expenses; and long-term care premiums, respectively.  That’s it.  All three bills are so short they could fit on a cocktail napkin together and still have room for a list of Obama’s failed Cabinet nominations.  This is not surprising: bills covering what individuals are allowed to do for themselves require less verbiage than bills mandating what individuals are required to do for their government.

•    Marsha Blackburn’s Health Care Choices for Seniors Act and Louis Gohmert’s Patient-Controlled Healthcare Protection Act allow seniors to opt out of Medicare and receive vouchers for health savings accounts, an arrangement analogous to school vouchers (another excellent idea liberals oppose).  Edward Royce’s Flexible Health Savings Act allows individuals to carry over unused health savings account funds from year to year.

•    John Shadegg’s Health Care Choice Act eliminates restrictions on interstate governing of health insurance, the primary cause of the limited within-state competition among private insurance companies that President Obama keeps bleating about.

•    Two bills—John Gingrey’s HEALTH Act and Michael Burgess’ Medical Justice Act—enact malpractice tort reform by regulating lawsuits for health care injuries or deaths.  William Thornberry’s Medical Liability Procedural Reform Act sets up state “health care tribunals” or medical courts to adjudicate claims.

•    Several unobjectionable but minor bills extend benefits for veterans, reserve members, and their dependents.

•    A few bills would amend the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to supposedly make it more accountable; however, these bills give the costly, bloated SCHIP so much legitimacy that I’m automatically suspicious of their authors’ credibility.

•    Other bills have good intentions but will lead to more bureaucracy and regulation than they aim to prevent; for example, Thornberry’s Health Care Paperwork Reduction and Fraud Prevention Act, which proposes a “Commission on Health Care Billing Codes and Forms Simplification” to standardize billing paperwork.  No doubt the government will first need to establish a separate commission just to simplify the Commission’s name.

•    Thornberry has proposed two more bad bills (why do public officials who want to meddle in our affairs always invent so many devious ways to do it?).  One is the Partnership to Improve Seniors’ Access to Medicare Act, which subsidizes student loan repayment for doctors who accept Medicare patients; not specified in the bill is how much of our bountiful federal surplus we’ll have to dip into to cover this provision.  Another is the Patient Fairness and Indigent Care Promotion Act, which allows doctors to deduct for tax purposes any unrecouped costs from “patient bad debt”—because nothing increases accountability like providing incentives for doctors not to check beforehand whether patients can pay their bills!

Other GOP bills contain additional provisions, and many of the bills are a mixed bag; but the point is that they’re all better than HR 3200, which is putrid right down to its last period.  Considering even a few key GOP bills over the next couple of years would be a sound way to address individual components of health care reform, in a piecemeal fashion, rather than upending our economy right this minute just because Democrats insist on artificial deadlines to maximize their political gain.

In the meantime, the proper response to any liberal who claims conservatives have no ideas of their own on health care reform should be a resounding, “You lie!”

President Obama is the opposite of Hamlet—he is desperately eager to do something on health care reform, right this minute, but he doesn’t particularly have any idea what it should be.

Obama spent most of July insisting that Congress had to pass a bill for him to sign before the August recess, in case they didn’t have enough political momentum by the time they got back.  Privately, Congressional Democrats fumed that Obama was offering no details on his preferred plan and was simply telling his spokespeople to assure them he would not rule out anything they decided.

Just before the recess, Obama got on TV for a Wednesday night address to the nation to “explain” the “details” of his “plan.”  The public’s reaction to his vague answers to reporters’ questions revealed as much frustration at his lack of specifics as Congress felt.

Since then, Obama has played “good cop, bad cop” with an unwilling Congress: Obama makes flowery promises—everyone who’s happy with the status quo can keep things as they are, everyone who’s unhappy can have everything completely different—while Congress is forced to work out the ugly details, like who’s going to pay for the plan.

At some point, Obama shifted away from his push for “health care reform” and began hinting that what he really wanted was “health insurance reform,” but he was too cowardly or indecisive to state his altered intention outright.

Obama similarly began to disavow the necessity of the public option when it became clear there were not enough votes in the Senate to pass a bill with one.  Rather than declare his switch in tactics openly, Obama implied that this had been his position all along, when he had clearly and repeatedly stated in the past that a public option would be necessary in order for him to sign a bill.  After the resulting backlash by House Democrats and Congressional leaders, Obama is once again on the fence about whether legislation must contain a public option or not.

Even New York Times columnists have been grumbling about Obama’s failure to make the case for health care reform.

As Bob Herbert complained, Obama “has been remarkably opaque about his intentions regarding health care.  He left it up to Congress to draft a plan and he has not gotten behind any specific legislation.  He has seemed to waffle on the public option and has not been at all clear about how the reform that is coming will rein in runaway costs.  At times it has seemed as though any old ‘reform’ would be all right with him.”

It’s obvious why dishonest politicians would choose to keep details of unpopular and impractical legislation vague in the early stages—i.e., to keep people from figuring out that it won’t work, will cost too much money, or will give the government greater control over our lives.  But at some point, leaders have to take a stand on what they will and will not tolerate, and let the chips fall where they may.  At  this point, Obama is acting as though he would be content to sign a phone book as long as the cover said “Health Care Reform Bill.”

Obama seems to think he can stay above the fray and maintain his popularity by not get involved in any messy details requiring those things we call “choices.”

But as Michael Barone notes, “The president must either insist on a ‘government option’ insurance plan or must let it be known that he will sign a bill without one…  Sooner or later the old politician’s dodge… won’t wash.”

Obama’s return-from-August-recess televised address to the nation Wednesday night is supposed to make it clear where he stands on the details of the various plans offered by Congress, after several months of hands-off cheerleading on his part.  But it’s obvious that things will be no clearer after his speech than before: his handlers are already scolding curious reporters for wanting to know specifics about what he’ll say and even whether the public will know where Obama stands on the public option after his address.

In a pre-speech interview today, Obama declared that “we do intend to get something done this year,” but hedged by saying that he was still “open to new ideas.”  Open to new ideas?  This is the same guy who demanded that Congress simply had to pass a comprehensive overhaul by the end of July?

Obama and his staffers are urgently motivated to do something, anything, on health care reform, so that they will be able to say that they did—something, anything.

In anticipation of the humiliating defeat of their socialized medicine scheme, Democrats are feverishly working to get their legislation passed by cheating.

Their plan, known as “budget reconciliation,” works as follows: (1) have Senate committees expand Medicaid, cut Medicare, force individuals to buy and businesses to offer insurance, give subsidies to low-income people and tax credits to small businesses, levy new taxes, and do everything else Democrats wanted to do in their health care bill but knew would never pass; (2) lump it all into a bill; and (3) pass it with 50 votes and no filibuster.

The bill would also contain language to support enactment of a health care overhaul, but because provisions unrelated to the budget cannot legally be included, the Senate parliamentarian will likely strike these from the bill.  According to the New York Times, which favors the reconciliation swindle, it is unclear whether two key elements will be allowed in the bill: the requirement that insurance companies accept all candidates and charge the same regardless of condition, and the creation of a government health insurance exchange.

The Times eggs Democrats on to declare that these two provisions, while irrelevant to the budget, “are so intertwined with other reforms that they are [necessary] for other provisions that do affect spending or revenues.”

If that ruse doesn’t work, the Times notes, then the process could “leave the reform package riddled with holes—perhaps providing subsidies to buy insurance on exchanges that do not exist, for example.”  In this eventuality, Democrats would pass a second bill, subject to filibuster, that fills in gaps where budget-irrelevant provisions were removed.

Ignore for the moment the fact that Democrats’ chess-playing skills obviously aren’t very good: to wit, why would Republican senators support a bill to prop up the reconciliation bill, if the two bills in combination would lead to an outcome they opposed in the first place?

Ignore, too, the stipulation that the reconciliation bill may not legally cause deficits to increase, which a health care overhaul clearly would do.

There’s just the inconvenient detail that reconciliation was never designed to be used for anything remotely like what Democrats propose to use it for.

According to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Rules, the purpose of budget reconciliation is to “fine tune revenue and spending levels.”  Admittedly, in the Obama era, adding a trillion-dollar program here or there could be characterized as “fine tuning,” but I don’t think this is what the creators of reconciliation had in mind.

Democrats have offered the following compelling argument for using reconciliation to socialize health care: Republicans have used reconciliation!

Yes, Republicans have used reconciliation—for things it was supposed to be used for, such as adjusting tax rates and decreasing entitlement spending.  Claiming that reconciliation can be used for health care because Republicans have used it is like claiming that pesos can be used at Taco Bell because Mexicans have used them.

Even the New York Times admits, “The approach is risky.  Reconciliation bills are primarily intended to deal with budget items that affect the deficit, not with substantive legislation like health care reform.”  Note the sneaky, dishonest addition of “primarily.”

As Judd Gregg explained to Norah O’Donnell, who insisted Gregg was a hypocrite because he had favored reconciliation in the past, “Reconciliation is meant to adjust already existing programs.  You adjust tax rates, or you adjust already existing programs at the margin.  What’s being proposed here is, ab initio, a brand-new, major initiative which is the total rewrite of the health care system of the United States.”

President Clinton floated the idea of using reconciliation to pass health care legislation in 1993, but Senator Robert Byrd reminded him that reconciliation was meant to be used to square away budgets, not turn us into Canada.  In 2003, Congressional Republican leaders considered, then rejected, using reconciliation to pass their prescription benefits program.

In 2005, Senate Republicans introduced a provision allowing drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an attempt that failed when the provision was removed during reconciliation.  Whether this attempt was appropriate or not, it should be pretty clear that if we’re not allowed to use reconciliation to drill in a barren wilderness that makes up less than 0.5% of Alaska in the middle of an energy crisis and a war in Iraq, then it’s not appropriate to use budget reconciliation to take over 17% of the economy.

There’s a reason budget reconciliation was introduced as a separate parliamentary process: it was to be used to make adjustments to existing programs, not introduce massive new ones.  The total amount of debate time allowed for reconciliation is only 20 hours—about twice as long as Congress had to read the 1,600-page stimulus bill before voting, but still not very long.

By the way, I don’t fault Obama for threatening to violate the spirit of bipartisanship with the reconciliation maneuver, inasmuch as (1) I don’t favor Republicans in charge having to compromise when Democrats propose screwy ideas and (2) in order to put a halt to bipartisanship, Obama would have had to actually start practicing it first.  But it’s ironic that Congressional Democrats believe they are putting aside their longstanding, magnanimous display of bipartisanship by resorting to sleazy use of a tactic called “reconciliation.”

The new test of liberal political ideology seems to be, not whether you favor Obama’s health care plan, but how long it takes you to realize what a disaster it is.

The American people were, as usual, first out of the gate to demonstrate their common-sense conservatism.  Although a slim majority voted for Obama in November, a growing preponderance has been telling pollsters they disapprove of the President and his handling of health care.   On Sunday, Rasmussen reported that Obama had reached a new low in their Presidential Approval Index, with health care one of his lowest-rated issues.

Like a teacher indulging a failing student’s pleas to find a way to give him extra points on his test, the Congressional Budget Office has spent all summer admonishing Obama for presenting legislation that will be more expensive than advertised, produce no savings, and yield expanding and unsustainable deficits for the next 10 years.  (“Now, Barry, I’ve already given you all the credit I can—next time you’ll just have to try harder.”)

The Mayo Clinic, which Obama cites as a model for cost-cutting measures, called the Medicare payment model proposed by Congress a “catastrophe.”

Seven state medical associations banded together with private medical societies and two previous AMA presidents in a letter to the President opposing the legislation.  The American Hospital Association is imploring hospital directors to counter Congress’s bill, as are specialty associations such as the American College of Physicians.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal cataloging the myriad flaws in Democrats’ proposal.

Sixty-thousand AARP members have cut up their cards since July over their leadership’s endorsement of Congress’s approach.  Though AARP supports the President’s general strategy, even they had to smack Obama down for claiming they had endorsed a bill when they had not yet done so.

After Obama insulted the Postal Service in his quest for a bill, the National Association of Postal Supervisors wrote Obama a letter expressing “our collective disappointment that you chose to use the Postal Service as a scapegoat …  [I]t was a kick to the chest to have you take a shot at a group of federal employees who are working hard every day to support this country.”

Pseudo-moderate network CNN recently chronicled “Five Freedoms You’d Lose in Health Care Reform,” including the freedom to negotiate details of your plan, cut costs by living healthier, choose a high-deductible plan, keep your current plan, and select your doctors.

The Associated Press fact-checked Obama’s claims and called him out for continuing to tell the same lies: e.g., if you like your health insurance, you can keep it—the implication being that you can keep it for as long as your employer and insurance company would otherwise have offered it without government health care, which is outlawed in Congress’s plan.

The Washington Post, no friend to conservatives, has been barraging readers with columns opposing ObamaCare.  Columnist David Hilzenrath affirmed that the administration would not be able to ensure that employees can keep the plans they have now.  Martin Feldstein explained that the 85% of Americans who now have insurance would pay higher taxes and receive fewer services.  Maya MacGuineas ridiculed the administration’s pledge that it can add an expensive new health care plan covering millions more Americans that will cost no extra and actually alleviate the budget deficit.

The Post’s editorial board also reminded the administration of the CBO’s harsh projections and warned him not to treat these lightly.  In a separate editorial, they scorned Democrats’ stubborn, mindless fixation on a public option.

Obama’s own Hyde Park doctor suggests that Congress’s legislation is worthless and adds of his patient, “I’m not sure he really understands what we face in primary care.”

In the workers’ paradise to our north, the current and incoming presidents of the Canadian Medical Association recently bemoaned the failures of Canada’s universal health care system, calling it “sick,” “precarious,” and “imploding,” and urged Canadian doctors to support free market reforms to the system.

The artist of the Obama “Joker” poster, Palestinian socialist and Dennis Kucinich supporter Firas Alkhateeb, admitted, “[Y]ou had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ.  From my perspective, there wasn’t much substance to him.”

Air America host Christiane Brown decried Obama’s reversal of his promise not to bar negotiation for lower drug prices, then purred, “He’s such a charming liar, though.  He’s such a nice guy when he lies like that.”

On Sunday, Senator Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats, said he’s changed his mind on proposed legislation and urges postponing it until the economy recovers.

Now The New York Times has gotten on the bandwagon; you might say they finally have some “skin in the game.”  Times reporter David Pear reported a few days ago that there is, after all, a legitimate basis for elderly Americans’ fear that legislation will lead to rationing of health care.

Paul Krugman criticized the President’s priorities, belittled his dwindling ability to inspire confidence, and lamented that “his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee.”

Bob Herbert scolded Obama for not explaining why a gargantuan new government program is in our country’s interest in the middle of a recession: “Many sane and intelligent people who voted for Mr. Obama… have legitimate concerns about the timing of this health reform initiative…  [He] has not been at all clear about how the reform that is coming will rein in runaway costs…  [P]eople are starting to lose faith in the president.”

I’m glad the Times is finally starting to see the light on Obama’s executive inexperience and his disastrous agenda.  Maybe now millions of Middle Americans who hang on Krugman and Herbert’s every word will develop more confidence in expressing their opposition at all those town hall meetings I keep hearing about.

The pile of victims President Obama has thrown under the bus in his attempts to get health care reform passed is growing so large that just treating their internal injuries is going to bankrupt the national health care system.

First it was the insurance companies.  When Obama realized early on that Americans weren’t chomping at the bit for socialized medicine, he subtly changed his language to imply that he was merely seeking “health insurance reform.”  Insurance companies, to remind Obama, by definition have a vested interest in not covering costly treatments for people with a 100% risk of having a particular medical condition.  But the administration nobly promised to go after, as the New York Times put it, “unpopular insurance industry practices, like refusing patients with pre-existing conditions”—also known as “providing insurance.”

Nancy Pelosi swore to oppose the “shock and awe, carpet-bombing by the health insurance industry to perpetuate the status quo”—as opposed to the couple, two-three homemade signs proffered by paid armies for Health Care for America Now, Organizing for America, SEIU, and ACORN.  Obama promised to “reform the insurance companies so they can’t take advantage of you.”  Pelosi slandered insurance companies as “villains.”

Surprisingly, insurance executives didn’t take kindly to being called monsters.  Karen Ignagni, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, seethed, “Attacking our community will not help get anyone covered…  We have to… correct the record.”

Next it was the pharmaceutical industry: in June, Obama twisted drug companies’ arms into forking over $80 billion toward health care reform, on the condition that the government would not bargain for reduced drug prices for Medicare or mandate price rebates.  Industry lobbyists, just to make sure they weren’t going to be stabbed in the back like the insurance companies, wrote the White House and secured confirmation from White House officials that these promises would be kept.

Congressional Democrats heard about these communications and had a fit.  The administration subsequently claimed that no such conditions had ever been discussed.  One of the House versions of the bill emerged containing provisions mandating both government drug price negotiations and additional price rebates.

Obama then started sacrificing groups less directly involved in health care but assumed to be shoo-in supporters of his agenda.  First he falsely claimed that AARP had endorsed Congress’s health care legislation: “We have the AARP on board” and “AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare.”  AARP’s terse response: “Indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate.”

Then Obama tossed 760,000 U.S. Post Office employees in the street when he argued that private health insurers wouldn’t be threatened by a public option: “If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine.  It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

The President of the National Association of Postal Supervisors responded to this charming occupational morale booster by sending Obama a letter asking him to rescind his comments: “On behalf of the 35,000 members of our association, I am writing to express our collective disappointment that you chose to use the Postal Service as a scapegoat…  [Y]our negative references to the Postal Services without knowledge of the facts was a disservice… to all postal employees…  [I]t was a kick to the chest to have you take a shot at a group of federal employees who are working hard every day to support this country…  [W]e would like to be treated fairly and not have our current situation misrepresented, especially by the Commander-in-Chief.”

Such Obama tactics recall his disastrous health care forum last month, in which he planted a question about Cambridge Police Department Sergeant James Crowley’s arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which gave Obama the chance to change the subject and denigrate blue-collar Massachusetts police officers who support him.  As department member Sergeant Kelly King stated after Obama declared that her department had acted “stupidly”: “It’s unfortunate.  I supported the president.  I voted for him.  I will not again.”

Obama even threw his dead grandmother under the bus—again.  When Sarah Palin charged that proposed legislation would lead to death panels that ration health care and decide which old people are not worth saving, Obama said he had favored his grandmother’s hip operation while she was alive, but could understand how a government panel might have calculated otherwise.

Unlike insurance companies, drug companies, the AARP, the post office, and the police, Obama’s grandmother couldn’t respond to his delightful remarks.  Would Obama have dared use that example if she were alive and in need of the operation?  Why doesn’t he try using it on seniors at townhall meetings who are in need of costly treatments?  “I’d pay for your operation if I were your relative, but I can see how a government panel made up of people you don’t know might feel otherwise.”

The latest Obama special interest group to be Greyhounded is House Democrats.  In June, Obama declared, “Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange… including a public option.”  On Sunday, Obama demurred, “The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.”  Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius insisted that a public option, which House Democrats heavily favor, is “not the essential element” of the plan.  Why, whatever gave you that idea?  Was it perhaps inclusion of the ambiguous word “must”?

Predictably, House Democrats have not accepted this about-face without a fight.  According to New York Representative Anthony Weiner, “Some of us who have gotten roughed up pretty good at town hall meetings and stuck in there because we believe in this, now kind of feel like we have a tire track on our chest where the bus that rolled over us is.”

Fortunately, House Democrats are the one party in all of this who deserve to be thrown under the bus—which is probably why the administration is already backtracking on their disavowal of the public option.