For The Record

Here was one participant at a Texas Tea Party Yesterday

If You Build It They Will Come

As I observe the debate on health care reform, and I do use the term debate loosely, there is a fascinating battle raging underneath the surface.

On the one hand we have avowed statists like the President, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid and many congressional democrats who favor what I call the Field of Dreams approach. The essence of this approach is if you build it they will come. Components include an entirely new Federal Bureacracy including a healhcare exchange to sell you the coverage you are required to buy from the public plan which was designed by a federal committee largely appointed by the President. Proponents of this approach know they cannot come right out and take a stand for single payer for many reasons;

1. The blue dogs would be savaged in future elections by seniors who lost the Medicare Advantage coverage they loved when the reimbursement was cut to fund the coverage for the uninsured.

2. The vanguard of the proletariat that is our present near supermajority does not believe the American people are smart enough to understand the intricate issues involved in health care reform like rationing. No  matter they will act for all us little people. It is why we elected them in their minds.

3. Demonizing the insurance companies, the HMO's ( a federal creation by the way) and the rich doctors is a proven tactic which tosses red meat to their base while diverting attention from the fact the government accounts for 60% of the health care spend today.

4. Incrementalism works and Medicare remains the sacred cow.

5. Polls show many Americans are satisfied with their own coverage and their own doctors and will resist overt change as congress is learning at the townhalls.

6. Someone might point out that universal coverage mandated by the states and controlled has not stopped medical inflation in workers compensation.

On the other hand we have voices speaking out for market solutions that are being shouted down as obstructionists, mere drones who articulate platitudes from Fox News or talk radio. No one is focused on what unites us as American's. We have only the extremes and no statesman. No one is looking at the root cause of the current crisis but is rather seeking to exploit the crisis for their own self interest.

One of the insurance companies I worked for years ago developed a fully integrated product to cover health care, workers compensation, short term disability, long term disability. If we build it they will come said the visionaries in marketing. Very few employers bought the product because they wanted the flexibility to replace vendors by product. They resisted also resisted having all their products with one vendor as a problem in one area would require them to move all products. Nothing was unbundled you see. An infamous story circulated at the company where an executive stood before senior management pleading for more money time until the market recognized the value and was chastised by the CFO; "You keep coming in hereselling the same dog food and the dog just won't eat that crap". He built it but they did not come. Obamacare reminds me of that dog food. And the dog still won't eat that crap.

ObamaCare Sails Into A Hurricane

If you look at the polls today Congress and President Obama are sinking fast but neither side seems to care and the public continues to get angrier. Why is this so?

John Avalon has written probably the most succinct explanation on the status of the health debate I have read in The Coming Liberal Suicide. I do not agree on the co-ops but he got everything else right. Writing about the failure of the leftists in congress to acknowledge a public plan leading to single payer cannot happen in today's budget environment for simple fiscal reasons both CBO and the public have pointed out.

Of the 21 top Democratic House leadership members and chairmen, five come
from districts carried by John McCain, but the average vote in the other 16
districts was 71 percent to 27 percent for Obama. Like Los Angeles’ Maxine
Waters and New York’s Anthony Weiner, they are ideologically and geographically
insulated from the skepticism generating from the great middle of the
country.

It’s a mistake that the architect of Medicaid and Medicare, Lyndon Johnson, never made. A Southern Democrat—sometimes derided by liberals as an “Eisenhower Democrat” when he was Majority Leader of the Senate—understood the need for bipartisan support for any major social reforms: His Medicare bill received the support of 70 House Republicans and 16 Senate Republicans. Even Newt Gingrich got it—his Welfare reforms gained the support of 101 Democrats at the high-water mark of the second Republican Revolution.

Liberals are in deep denial about the source of the president’s falling poll numbers during this summer’s health-care debate. They think the problem—perceptions of arrogant over-reaching liberalism—is the cure. It’s the same self-serving mistake that the extremes always make.

President Obama needs to depolarize the health-care debate. He got off-message because he got off-center. Embracing a bipartisan bill that replaces the public option with a nonprofit co-op will not “muddy” the debate but help clarify it. It will not
be a retreat but a way forward.

Lyndon Johnson once joked that “the difference between liberals and cannibals is that cannibals don’t eat their friends and family members.” In half-century-long history of failed health-care reforms from Harry Truman on down, liberal cannibalism has been as much to blame for defeats as fear-mongering from the far right.

The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. The goal is to decrease costs and increase coverage. If today’s liberals don’t understand the lesson of their own political history and insist on attacking their president, they will have the failure of
this health-care reform on their hands.

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