President Obama has been perfectly clear. He has said that his plan for “health-care reform” would not cause any individuals or families to lose their health-care plans, would not be paid for by cutting seniors’ Medicare benefits, would not bend the health-care cost-curve up (but instead would bend it down), would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, would not raise Americans’ health insurance premiums (by $2,100 a year in the individual market) but instead would lower them (by $2,500), would not put the federal government in control of health care, would not require Americans to buy health insurers’ product under penalty of law, would not cost more than $900 billion over ten years (and certainly not $2.5 trillion, like the Congressional Budget Office says it would cost), would not raise deficits, would not liberalize rules preventing taxpayer funding of abortions, would increase competition and choice, would leave what’s good in place while fixing what’s broken, would be bipartisan, and would be passed in an open and transparent manner with the C-SPAN cameras rolling for all to see.
Would it have been too much to have hoped that the president would go 1-for-14?
Americans are apparently taking note of the disconnect between what the president says and what he does. His approval rating is now below 50 percent, having plummeted 30 percent since he took office. And yet he continues to push his unpopular health care overhaul, seemingly oblivious to his own falling popularity and to his proposed legislation’s failure to deliver on any of the 14 promises listed above.
The real wonder is that the congressional Democrats, who have promises of their own to keep and elections of their own to win, keep falling in lockstep behind him as if he were rolling along with 70-percent approval ratings. And the intriguing question is whether they will continue to risk their own demise so that the president can meet his private goal. That goal — which, as is becoming increasing evident, is driving this entire process — is not to pass ‘health-care reform’ per se, but to pass it in time for him to talk about it in his State of the Union address.
