ObamaCare / PelosiCare Update

The Inevitable Debacle
By the Editors

The latest health-care bill, offered by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is more of the same. Like every other Democratic bill before Congress, this “comprehensive reform” has two major features: First, it transforms insurance into a product that few rational people would buy. Second, it forces them to buy it.

Like the Baucus bill, Pelosi’s alternative imposes massive costs on states and individuals so that its sponsors can describe it as “cheap” for the federal government. Like the Baucus bill, it contains disguised tax increases on middle-class Americans: In the case of Pelosi’s bill, the chief subterfuge is to impose taxes on “the rich” with no adjustment for inflation: Over time more and more Americans will pay the higher taxes.

Pelosi’s bill is being called “less liberal” than some of its predecessors because the government-run insurance program it creates would not be allowed to force bargain-basement rates on doctors. To dwell on this question — unless you are a lobbyist for one of the affected interests — is to miss the forest fire for the trees. The details of the “public option” are not what make this bill a mistake; and it would remain a mistake even if it lacked a public option altogether.

All of the Democratic bills are likely to increase premiums. All of them are too expensive, too coercive, too likely to generate governmental interference with medical practice, and too disruptive. All of them subsidize abortion. All of them reject incremental reform in favor of liberal hubris. House Republicans should promote alternatives that are the opposite on every count.

None of this is to deny that the differences among the Democratic bills have any import at all. They suggest that there is less than meets the eye to Democratic claims that passage of what they style “reform” is inevitable. Democrats have not agreed on how to pay for reform, for example, which is no small matter. The Democrats’ approach to health care remains unpopular. What seems most inevitable is that sooner or later they will pay for it.



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On the Pelosi health-care bill:

We've always had shamelessness, but we've never had it on this galactic scale. This is [the] shamelessness of a quarter-trillion-dollar trick.

And the trick works like this — the bill has in it the assumption (which the CBO has to accept) that they will cut a quarter trillion of Medicare by cutting the fees that doctors and others receive.

We know it's not going to happen because the House is going to have a separate bill in which it pays the quarter of a trillion — with no offsets — out of the borrowed money. So it is a huge hole in the budget, but it is in a separate bill.

The separate bill ought to be called the "Pinnacle of Cynicism Act," because that's exactly what it is. However, in the bill that will be called the National Healthcare Reform Act, it [the payment to doctors of that $250 billion] is not going to appear, and that's why it [net cost of the health-care bill] ends up under a trillion — when in fact it is over a trillion. And [that is] why it ends up with no deficit whereas it will increase the deficit by about $200 billion.

So that's the black hole at the center of all this.

Secondly, if you step back and say we're, in fact, creating an entitlement of $1 trillion dollars, and even if it is offset with raises in taxes, and …cuts in other spending, that is $1 trillion that you can otherwise apply to other parts of the ... deficit, which is now going to be $9 trillion over a decade.

So, in other words, you create an entitlement. You steal the possible revenue sources out of other deficit reduction, and in the end you blow a hole in the deficit that is just enormous.