ObamaCare - Is it Imploding ? Make It So !

Tottering [Rich Lowry]

The Reid bill is really tottering now.

"If this thing falls apart, you can look back to today as the tipping point," says a Republican aide in the Senate, echoing what Lamar Alexander notes in the Costa post below. First, there was last night's CNN poll showing 61 percent opposition. Then, there was the devastating CMS report today. "Nobody went to the floor that I could see to defend it on the Democratic side," says the aide. The back-drop for all this is the non-deal that Reid hyped as a break-through earlier this week, only to have it unravel almost immediately. Even Bill Nelson says the Medicare buy-in is basically a "non-starter." "You're starting to see other Democrats nibbling around the edges," the aide says. He predicts that if one Democrat comes out clearly against the Reid bill, others will follow, in a dynamic like the unexpectedly decisive defeat of the amnesty bill a few years ago. Reid also has to worry about the clock. He needs everything to break exactly right—a CBO score coming in on Monday, a score that's good, no intervening, unexpected drama—to force a final showdown next weekend. If he goes to Christmas break without a bill, it gets much harder to pick up the pieces in January. Since the Senate debate began, the bill has only gotten more unpopular. It’s all still in flux obviously, but we just might be watching the bill fall apart before our eyes.


Humpty Dumpty Harry Reid [Robert Costa]

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and GOP conference chair, tells NRO that Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) is “all tied up in a knot.”

“All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men may not be able to put 60 together again,” says Alexander, in reference to the (barely) 60 votes Reid got last month to bring his bill to the floor. “With two weeks until Christmas, Democrats find themselves in the awkward position of trying to pass a 2,000-page bill — a bill which most of them admit they don’t know much about.”
Alexander cites the new report from the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a potential death blow to Reid’s cause. The CMS, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, says that if Reid’s bill became law, America would spend $234 billion more on health care over the next decade.

“Add the CMS report to the Mayo Clinic’s devastating letter against the expansion of Medicare, as well as the opposition of the American Medical Association and hospitals to Reid’s Medicare idea, and it’s clear that the more people find out about this, the less they like it,” says Alexander. “I’m not ready to make a prediction (on whether it will fail), but things aren’t looking good for the majority leader.”

Looking back at the health-care debate this week, Alexander mused about how awkward Reid has been in managing the debate. “Senator Reid moved up the appropriations bill because he didn’t want a drug importation,” says Alexander. “He was afraid that the (Dorgan-McCain) importation proposal would pass and blow up his deal with Big Pharma, who has been the principle funder of Obamacare’s ad campaign. Then you had the public-option compromise and the furor over his proposal to expand Medicare. Then last night’s CMS report. Senator Reid doesn’t know where to turn. He surely doesn’t have 60 votes yet, because if he did, he’d move to close debate.”

“Friday, December 11 may turn out to be a seminal day for the health-care debate,” says Alexander. “The majority leader has been trying to create a sense of inevitability, but this debate is beginning to feel a lot like the 2007 immigration debate. The sense of inevitability is rapidly diminishing. Every new survey shows public support fading. CNN says that 61 percent of Americans are opposed to this bill.”

Why is there such growing public frustration with Reid’s bill? “Health care is not the only issue at work here,” says Alexander. “Health care has become a proxy for public restlessness and anger about bailouts, spending, and debt. All of these issues are tied up


Chalres Krauthammer

On Rep. Anthony Weiner’s statement that the expansion of Medicare is “an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me who have been arguing for a single-payer system”:
What Weiner did today is: He committed the classic Kinsley gaffe. [Michael] Kinsley defined a Washington gaffe as a politician who accidentally speaks the truth — and then you have to apologize and retract.

He [Weiner] spoke the truth on this because what you're getting in the [Senate health-care] bill now — if you have expansion of Medicare to include a younger decade — you have got an enormous expansion of government control: You have an expansion in Medicaid, which is for the poor; an expansion of S-CHIP which is for the near-poor children; and you add on to that expansion of Medicare — and you have got about three-quarters of the population under a direct system of government insurance.

What's left is a shrunken private sector which is heavily regulated. And you have individual mandates, penalties, and a huge amount of regulation — 118 commissions and other regulatory bodies … As Weiner has said, you're on the road — you're almost there — to a government takeover.

Now, if we want to have that — and there are arguments in favor of that: Canada and the U.K. are humane countries and they work with a government-run system. But we ought to have an open debate on that and not have it shoved in in the middle of the night with eight days to go in a self-imposed deadline on a radical change in one-sixth of the American economy.

The problem here is the substance, and also the process, which is out of control and makes no sense at all. …

Look at the madness of this [Medicare expansion]. Why are the doctors and the hospitals opposed to it? Because the existing system of Medicare repayment is ruining them.

We are killing the golden goose. We have the best doctors, the best hospitals in the world. This is going to be catastrophic. Without doctors and hospitals, you don't have a health-care system. All you have are politicians in Washington.


Sticker Shock for Dem 'Deal' [Daniel Foster]

Americans will face steep premiums under the government-negotiated private plans and massive expansion of Medicare at the core of Harry Reid's new “public option.” A family of four making $54,000 would pay more than $825 per month for one federally-managed plan — that even after a $10,100 government subsidy

.A 55-year-old couple buying into the Medicare expansion could pay $15,200 per year under the Reid plan, and it remains unclear how much if any of that cost would be subsidized. The Medicare buy-in would only be available to individuals 55-and-over, not younger family members, and it would be attached to premium and financing structures separate from the rest of Medicare, with no cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

And these, alas, are only the direct costs of the bill.

The NYT has the full story here, and you can track the latest on Obamacare at NRO On the News.