The House of Representatives has already approved, and the Senate is pontificating on — er “taking up,” — the first major legislative package of the Obama administration. When considering the $900 billion monster, leave aside for the moment the two obvious questions of whether we can afford this bill and whether it can stimulate economic growth. There is, in fact, another salient line of questions going unpondered — the question of what policies the package promotes, and what their long-term impact will be.
The package has already been exposed as a Trojan Horse, so to speak, for the Democrats’ birth control policies, with its $200 million for contraceptives, which has since suffered legislative interruptus. But on the health front, there are other, less public, acts of indecency underway. According to former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, this package, properly understood, is really the Democrats’ opening salvo on health-care reform. If Republicans surrender this opportunity to defeat this package, or at the very least articulate an opposing viewpoint, they will be handing the Democrats a major victory in their efforts to re-make America’s health care system and drive it down the path of increased government intervention.
