If Obamacare passes this week, every American will rightly blame every problem they have with American medicine in the future on the Democrats.
Every inability to get an appointment with a specialist or even a general practitioner. Every increase in insurance rates. Every incomprehensible bill received. Every pharmacist’s refusal to fill a prescription without charge or with the drug called for with the pill actually prescribed by the doctor.
And especially every inability to actually get insurance or treatment.
Democrats from the president and the House speaker on down have told us over and over again that Obamacare is the salvation of American medicine. When it turns out not to be, and premiums skyrocket and the supply of doctors dwindles, the ownership of the scheme and the method of its passage — by partisan trickery after clear expressions of voter will in polling and at polls in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey — will embed in every voter.
“You break it, you bought it” is a phrase familiar to and accepted by most Americans. Democrats are about to break American health care — which is extraordinary in the cures it delivers and works quite well for hundreds of millions of Americans — and they are doing so for partisan reasons.
The consequences of the jam-down, if it succeeds, will reshape American politics.
Five Ohio Democratic members of Congress, for example, face a choice this week between the demands of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the president, and the desires of their constituents.
Zack Space, Charles Wilson, Marcy Kaptur, Steve Driehaus and John Boccieri have districts that range across the Buckeye State, but each of those districts could easily turn red this fall and punish the members who voted for the deeply unpopular Obamacare.
Space, Wilson, Kaptur, Driehaus and Boccieri are being asked to vote for the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase and special deals for Florida’s elderly, but not Ohio’s. Are they that deeply in Pelosi’s pocket?
At least 50 House Democrats, from Tim Bishop on Long Island, N.Y., to Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Ariz., are in the same bind, but the Ohio representatives come from a state that is reeling from job loss and is seeing a sharp turn back to common sense, led by the campaigns of John Kasich for governor and Rob Portman for senator. A wave is building in Ohio, and a vote for Obamacare will only increase the exposure of these incumbents.
Rank-and-file Democrats in office all across the country have to be asking themselves, why this rush to self-destruct? Not only will a “triumph” on Obamacare cost the party its huge majorities in both houses in 2010, it will saddle the party with the legacy of damaging American health care that will define it for generations.
This is the sort of risk that has brought other major legislative overhauls forward under bipartisan banners. In recent decades, the prescription drug benefit, No Child Left Behind and welfare reform advanced major change with bipartisan backing from Congress, thus immunizing either party from the political costs of major change.
But those programs were small compared with the massive assault on American medicine reaching its crucial vote this week. If enough congressional arms are twisted and the savaging of American medicine proceeds, it has “Democrat” written all over it.
And from that day forward, every tragedy that isn’t averted because a doctor wasn’t there or a medicine hadn’t been developed or a hospital had been obliged to close will be the fault of Democrats who gambled with the lives of Americans even as the country fairly screamed, “Don’t do it.”
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
