Health care is a complex issue, but one wouldn’t know it by the way Congressional leadership and the Administration are jamming their health care ideas down the legislative pipeline. Their program isn’t fully shaped as yet, but the outlines of it are beginning to solidify. What this legislation has in common with other vital pieces of legislation rammed through Congress in the last few months is the way the President, and Democrat majorities in Congress are framing the debate in terms of imminent crises and cataclysmic disaster if it isn’t passed. We think they’ve gone to that well once too often and if they persist, health care and its as yet undetermined costs will be turned back if not in Congress, then at the ballot box in 2010.
This doomsday scenario technique has given us a succession of spending bills that were neither well articulated beforehand nor well administered after. As with those bills, health care is also certain to leave us under a mountain of debt for future generations to deal with.

Just for the record, we first got TARP 1 weighing in at close to 800 billion dollars. Imminent catastrophe was the overriding theme and pushed by media, Congress and candidates McCain and Obama, President Bush signed the bill ignoring Mark Twain’s wisdom that it is time to switch sides when one is surrounded by a majority.

More breathless threats of disaster led to a huge 417 billion dollar appropriations bill which was passed so quickly that nobody had a chance to read it about the 89,000 earmarks tucked in every corner of it. This was President Obama’s bill patterned on Rahm Emanuel’s stated policy to never let a crises go to waste. Another crises scenario Emanuel couldn’t pass up gave us TARP 2 bringing largesse to historic proportions along with waste and fraud and of course, much more debt.

In each case, the need for immediacy was profound and the administration and Congressional majorities with the blessings of a pliant media allowed hardly any deliberation and bridged little criticism. Take a minute and think about this: You and I don’t pay our bills with blank check, but we allow the Congress to do that on our behalf. Being cajoled, bullied and hurried in deliberations is no excuse and now health care finds itself in a crises that demands another blank check, mountains of unfunded obligations that will translate into debt for generations to come.

“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those in the shadows of life—the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” –Hubert Humphrey.

Health care plans being bruited about right now have little to do with the sick, the needy and the handicapped and much to do with the terms of trade in the health care industry. The crises being manufactured to add momentum to the political urgency for legislation centers around the number 47 million: the mythical 47 million uninsured.

The myth says the 47 million can’t afford insurance, but the numbers say that most are young, well off and can afford insurance, but choose not to. Subtract non-citizens who bloat the numbers by 10+ million, and eliminate those who choose not to, and THE problem is not a crises. Pearl Harbor was a crises. The Depression was a national tragedy. September 11th was an imminent threat. But 10-15 million uninsured is a problem for government to fix and not a reason-crises to be used as an excuse to move 250 million insured citizens into a system of rationed, government administered healthcare. Then there is the disingenuous ‘public option’.

Very few citizens understand the perversity of the ‘public option’ being proposed and how it will wreck the private delivery of health care. It will do this by forcing private resources to compete with taxpayer subsidized entities which distort the market long enough to fool enough of the people some of the time… until the true cost/benefit relationship becomes apparent. 1300 private companies providing that insurance will be driven out of business. Quality care will be scarce and then rationed. Terms of insurance will not be clearly defined and vaguely explained. And all of this won’t come home to roost until the ‘private options’ are long gone. Humphrey’s ‘poor and sick’ will be first to feel the shortcomings of a system not fully understood before it is law.

George Washington often said that our society is made up of competing interests. With the President and his administration crafting a bill, it seems that every interest is being considered except for Hubert Humphrey’s ‘sick and needy’ as well as those who pay the bills. We also forget that the providers will be nationalized out of existence as well. ‘My son the doctor’ will become a lousy career choice and we all will be poorer for it.

President Obama ran a great campaign, but it is time for that campaign to stop and for his people to start governing and not campaigning for revolutionary change that few understand and fewer want. No more blank checks.

Americans are slow to come to some things, but they do know the difference between politics and government and instead of there being an election in 2012 for the presidency, it is likely that in 2010 it will be all about the presidency even without the president on the ballot.

–nrg

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