It seemed for a while a really big mystery that, with the deficit at a $1.3 trillion record, members of the House would plan on treating themselves to $550 million worth of new passenger jets, but now all is clear. They need a way to get out of Dodge, and very, very quickly, if they really do foist a new health deal on the nation.
There’s evidence some such insanity could still be coming our way, for there was Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Denver the other day, explaining that the proposals would not add to deficits or restrict benefits or decrease access to care, which would be more than a little hard to do, considering what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says.
Its message is and has been that none of the reform’s cost-cutting ideas will cut costs enough to prevent incredible new costs on top of incredible old costs — Medicare’s tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities — and that you will either have to have sky high deficits or sky high taxes and that either one will pretty much kill us economically. Huge numbers of the citizenry seem to get that, and to get something else, too — that the government will in fact give us both big deficits and high taxes (Pelosi says absurdly they can be restricted to the super-rich) while trying desperately to save money by doing what Pelosi said it would not do, restricting benefits and denying care.
There are hints of this all over the place.
Those hints are included in President Barack Obama’s plan for a Medicare panel with sweeping if not wholly unchecked powers to establish fees and limit treatments.
The hints are to be found in his purpose of less overall expense partly through new “incentive” systems for doctors at a time he is aiming to establish a public plan to help absorb what he sees as some 50 million new insurance beneficiaries.
And they are to be found in the extraordinary loose but plentiful talk from many quarters about old people and others getting more health care than they need.
A lot of us can agree that the present ways of doing things have serious flaws and that steps must be taken to fix things, but it worries some — obviously including the protesters at congressional town hall meetings — that the Democrats are figuring on passing an expensive, sweeping, ill-considered, poorly understood, politically manipulated, rush-job, reckless blunderbuss of a bill that will inevitably have unintended consequences and could do serious harm to millions of people. Maybe there’s too much shouting, but the protesters have hardly constituted mobs, as we’ve been told by the suddenly anti-protest left, and if some groups here and there made calls to help get these worried people to exercise their free-speech rights, so what exactly?
This we know — they are not un-American neo-Nazis, as the incompetent, endlessly prevaricating Pelosi has suggested, though the reaction of the Obama White House has in fact been un-American, startlingly so.
The president himself has said he does not want the people “who created this mess,” meaning the present health system, to “do a lot of talking,” and the White House asked over the Internet that any friends seeing “fishy” claims about the reform package send back e-mails. A vast conspiracy to silence critics? Not exactly, but certainly a reach beyond the acceptable.
The message seems to be damn the objections, full speed ahead, and if the Democrats can’t then cover up the multitude of ruinous results, they can at the very least run like crazy to board any new jets they purchase.
