President Obama’s health care plan is beginning to seem like Grigori Rasputin, the evil, crazy pre-revolutionary Russian monk who was poisoned and lived, was shot in the back and lived, was shot twice more and lived, was beaten up and lived, and was finally tied up and tossed in an icy river, where he lived long enough to try to get loose.
This health plan has so far endured expert analyses telling us it could be economically ruinous without fixing much of what ails us. It has hung on during one of the most extraordinary outbursts of dissidence by ordinary citizens in recent history.
It has refused to die even when independents told pollsters they had had it with this wackiness, and even now, after three anti-statist elections and a slight but significant change in the Senate’s balance of power, it is still being vigorously pushed.
Obama has revamped it some, has a new whipping boy that might help him gain support for it, has a nationally televised session planned with Republicans to lend some showbiz razzmatazz to his arguments, is carrying on about partisanship and ignorance and lies, and is clearly intent on getting this thing passed pretty soon.
Like Rasputin, the plan nevertheless remains evil and crazy. It treats 21st-century Americans like the subjects of Middle Ages monarchy, telling them what they must buy; could prolong the recession by scaring businesses to death with new costs; and will definitely worsen the frightening problem of runaway government spending.
Never mind, because Obama can now point to a recent, steep rise in insurance premiums in California and promise price controls as part of his improved plan, and some people may respond positively without understanding that such controls never fix anything in the real world but will generally, in one way or another, make matters worse.
The big point is that the Obama proposal would establish a new entitlement using subsidies for many of the 30 million or more people he wants to provide insurance to, when one of the single biggest issues this country faces is the uncontrollable cost of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Under the Obama plan, Medicaid will get more expensive still.
There is right now a proposed reduction in Medicare that will mean reduced benefits for current recipients despite a pretense it will not. Look for a revival in the art of tarring and feathering if this happens.
The way to address Medicare is not by hurting current recipients, but by changing future rules, and one workable way is the way advocated by Paul Ryan, R.-Wis., who would institute a voucher system allowing recipients to pick their own insurance company out of ones that have passed a federal test.
As for the other problems Obama says he is addressing, various Republicans have voiced far better ideas, such as giving insurance tax subsidies to individuals instead of business firms, selling insurance nationally and bringing an end to the unbelievably expensive way we now wage malpractice suits.
Still more is needed, but what is not needed is all the misleading hooey about how European systems produce vastly superior treatment outcomes or how the socialist systems do not have their own horror stories.
The least bipartisan player in all of this has been Obama himself, and the least convincing rhetoric has been the palaver about how we are ungovernable — why, because the nation resists disaster?
I guess the Republicans could abandon all their principles and go along, or the Democrats could abuse precious tradition for power’s sake, but there is a better answer. Do the right thing.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at [email protected].
