What we know about the health-care bill poised to pass on a party-line vote in the House of Representatives is this:

• The bill’s cost may run as high as $3 trillion. Let me repeat that. Three trillion dollars.
• A desperate effort to find some means of defraying that cost makes significant tax increases on the middle class necessary, and will bring back the disastrous problem of “bracket creep”—the phenomenon that held sway during the high-tax 1970s when a salary increase would cause someone to earn less money because he would be jumped into a new bracket.
• It will feature a complete reordering of American health care. The problem is that we have no idea whether the reordering will do anything to repair the jerry-rigged system we have rather than introducing more confusion, more expense, and more unanticipated consequences—as has been the case with most reforms over the past 25 years. This remarkable summary by James Capretta tells the ultimate cautionary tale in this regard: “There’s no prospect that the federal government will become more nimble overnight at managing the vast and complex health sector in the United States. To control costs in health care, the federal government will do what it always does — it will set prices. In time, that will have the predictable result of driving out willing suppliers of services, leading to queues and access problems. Call it centrally-planned rationing of care.”
• The entire effort is disingenuous in any case. The so-called “public option”—the poll-driven euphemism for health insurance run by the federal government — is the goal driving all liberal health-care-reform ideas. It is the camel’s nose in the tent. It is not a slippery slope to national health care—it is an artificial Alpine ski range that has been built and then iced over for the purpose of hurtling us into it. Only the desire to pass a bill and call whatever is passed “revolutionary” caused the Obama White House and some in the Senate to take their eyes off the prize for a little while.

If some version of the House bill actually becomes law next year, it will happen for two reasons. First, this is what Democrats generally believe, and when a party is in power, it will generally work to pass measures that consort with its ideological leanings. Second, Democrats will find themselves with a choice that isn’t much of a choice—to vote for something they think is noble, or to vote against it cravenly because they see what an electoral disaster it might represent for them. In such a circumstance, the choice to act nobly will always prevail, because there’s no way to be sure the craven move will have a positive effect.

Thus, at least, if this horror comes to pass, it will be the result of deep ideological conviction. And that deep ideological conviction may well be their undoing.  In which case, they will go down having done something they think is good. Which is nice for them, even as it may prove to be a disaster from which we are going to spend a very, very long time working to extricate ourselves.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 7:32 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.