That’s the line that was best received by the 600-plus-person audience at a debate on Obamacare I participated in along with University of Colorado Law School professor Paul Campos on Thursday night in Denver. Campos, who writes for the Daily Beast and is a reliable lefty, earned enormous points with the mostly hostile-to-Obamacare crowd simply for showing up to defend the general outlines of the various “reform” proposals under consideration by the Congress. That’s more than most Democratic members of Congress will do, and with reason. Obamacare can’t be defended if the right questions are asked of its proponents — questions almost never posed by the legacy media.
Our debate’s moderator was John Andrews, a former state senator in Colorado, founder of the Independence Institute and now head of Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute. Andrews structured our exchange so we could ask each other questions. And as would be the case in any setting, Obamacare cannot be defended against very simple, very direct questions.
Here are the handful of questions every sponsor of any version of Obamacae ought to be obliged to answer — in detail:
1. Can you specify, at least to the level of tens of millions, exactly where the $300 billion in cuts to Medicare proposed by president will come from?
2. The president and his allies agree that the cost of Medicare Advantage programs will have to increase for seniors. By how much? Will those increases arrive annually?
3. The president and his allies agree that some Medicare services will have to be cut. Which services?
4. Forty-five percent of doctors responding to a recent Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll responded that if Obamacare passed, they would consider quitting or retiring. Do you believe them? Even if only a significant portion of these disgruntled doctors retired or quit as a result of the passage of Obamacare, wouldn’t that make the delivery of health care much more difficult than it already is?
5. The five-year survival rate of women with breast cancer in the United States is higher than that of women in Great Britain. The five-year survival rate for American men with any form of cancer is much higher than the same survival rate among all European men. How do you account for such a disparity?
These and other simple questions explode the premises surrounding Obamacare. Professor Campos quite passionately argued that there were enormous gaps in America’s health care system and pointed to the appalling number of personal bankruptcies that result because of the extraordinary cost of health emergencies.
But the fact that there are enormous problems with the American health system has nothing to do with the efficacy of the proposed solutions offered in all of the versions of Obamacare. Lung cancer is a terrible disease, but it cannot be treated by open-heart surgery. Too often, the critics of American medicine are offering not just the wrong prescriptions but proposals certain to kill the patient.
Significant majorities of Americans now recognize that all the president’s men have not been able to come up with anything remotely approaching an acceptable plan for mending some of the holes in American health care. Seniors, especially, have recognized the target on their collective back, and they are rebelling en masse. Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl said on my show last week that “senior citizens ought to be extraordinarily fearful of all three of these bills.”
“Seniors should be deathly afraid,” he continued, “and I use that phrase advisedly.”
Seniors are deathly afraid of Obamacare, and with good reason, as are tens of millions of other Americans who like their health insurance and didn’t vote to have it overhauled even if they voted for “change.” Congressional Democrats ignore the deep, passionate and — crucially — informed opposition to Obamacare at their political peril. Continued attempts to jam down this huge lurch to the left will result in a massive swing to the right in November 2010.
