Vin Suprynowicz

Following Barack Obama’s speech to Congress on health care Wednesday evening, and despite unified opposition from minority Republicans, Democratic congressional leaders said Thursday they expect to pass “reform” legislation within the next few months.

They have the votes; there’s little reason to believe they won’t.

The better question is what such a bill will look like.

Those hoping the president might pull back from his plan for a massive government takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy, instead offering a truly “bi-partisan” plan which could win GOP support for free-market reforms including an end to expensive state coverage mandates, freedom to buy insurance across state lines, and a “loser pays” regime for medical malpractice suits, didn’t get much.

On the contrary, the president ridiculed those who “just this year supported a budget that would essentially have turned Medicare into a privatized voucher program. That will not happen on my watch,” he vowed. “I will protect Medicare.”

From being put onto any sustainable financial footing, apparently.

The president did mention malpractice reform as a distant possibility, promising to “move forward” on “authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these ideas” … but he held a pretty big hammer over the table where he placed those crumbs, vowing “I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than to improve it.”

So much for “bi-partisanship,” which in the Democratic thesaurus shows up as a synonym for “his way or the highway.”

There was not much change in the president’s umpteenth address on health insurance reform. Most notable was his continued — and still fantastic — assertion that “Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.”

Since no bureaucrat sees his or her paycheck reduced as punishment for waste — in fact, the opposite is typical, as higher spending builds bigger management pyramids — government has no incentive NOT to “go for broke.” Medicare had cost 20 times the initial estimates within just a few decades of its creation; the president now insists the way to get costs down is not merely to subsidize health insurance for the few million legal residents who now lack it and don’t already qualify for one of the nation’s existing income-transfer schemes, but rather to expand Medicare to cover the entire nation!

What on earth kind of “reduction of waste” is this guy — who has never worked as so much as a candy-striper — talking about? Re-using the tongue depressors?

Public option ‘down the drain’

While praising Mr. Obama’s speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada signaled separately that the president may not prevail in his inflexible call for legislation to allow the federal government to sell insurance in competition with private industry.

Sen. Reid said he could be satisfied with establishment of nonprofit cooperatives, along the lines expected to be included in the bill taking shape in the Senate Finance Committee.

Ms. Pelosi, though she has long favored a measure that allows the government to sell insurance, passed up a chance Thursday to say it was a nonnegotiable demand.

As long as legislation makes quality health care more accessible and affordable, “We will go forward with that bill,” she said.

The problem is thus not Republican opposition to the government “competing” with private firms. (In fact, since the government would mandate which identical coverages each private firm must offer, and what each private firm could charge, this is a vision of “competition” which could be taken seriously only in some Marxist ivory tower, like saying you have “all the competition you need” if FedEx and UPS are driven out of business, but you still have two different post offices, one selling red stamps and the other one selling green stamps.)

Rather, the problem lies in the resistance of “moderate” Democrats from places OTHER than Massachusetts, Santa Monica, and New York City, who already have their eyes on next year’s elections.

And that means, “As for the public option, that’s pretty clearly gone down the drain,” in the pithy summary of James Ridgeway of Mother Jones magazine.

Mr. Obama continued to insist Wednesday that his approach will not result in higher deficits, vowing again to veto any bill which would have that effect.

But the Congressional Budget Office says Mr. Obama’s plan will cost a fortune.
Nevada Congressman Dean Heller offered an amendment in House Ways and Means this summer which would have cut off enrollment in the “public option” plan at the maximum number of people who now lack insurance, as determined by the Census Bureau. Democrats defeated that amendment.

If their goal is merely to insure the uninsured, why vote down such a cap (just as they voted down amendments specifying the plan wouldn’t cover illegal aliens, and that it wouldn’t cover abortions)?

Obviously, Democratic congressmen know the “public option” would end up insuring most Americans, after the government mandates drive the private competitors out of business. This is precisely the “indirect road” to a single-payer system that candidate Obama said years ago the far Left would have to follow to put such a scheme over on an unwilling American public.

And this is precisely what the CBO foresaw when it attached a massive deficit price tag to the president’s scheme.

‘They said it would lead to socialism. “Socialism”!’

It does appear the Democrats are united, at least, in their determination to bar insurance companies from denying coverage for “pre-existing conditions.”

Telling insurance companies they must offer “coverage” to those with pre-existing conditions is wildly popular — reporters for local newspapers and TV stations around the country who sat with small groups of senior citizens as they watched the president’s speech Wednesday reported cheers and applause when the president vowed that proviso would remain in any congressional bill.

The problem is that, whatever would be left after such a mandated change, it would no longer be “insurance coverage.”

Insurance, as the term was once understood, meant sharing the risk of outcomes which could not be predicted.

If one ship in 20, sailing to the Orient for tea and spices, was formerly lost to storm or piracy, the owners were free to each contribute 5 percent of the value of each ship and cargo to an “insurance” fund. An owner who lost his ship could thus claim 20 times what he had paid and be made whole. His fellows bore the small loss, knowing it might be they who would lose a ship next year.

Similarly, a hundred workers each paying a percentage of their paycheck for health insurance don’t know which of their number may contract a disease which requires expensive treatment. They are sharing the risk.

But what if now a person who has recently discovered he or she has that disease tries to join their pool, knowing full well he or she will use up everyone else’s pooled “premiums” for his or her treatment in the next year, even though he or she paid nothing to “share the risk” in years past? Such a latecomer is not proposing to “share the risk,” he or she is just seizing the funds everyone else put up in good faith, leaving nothing in the pot anyone else.

If government requires the pool to accept this late-comer, this is not longer “risk sharing.” It’s government-mandated income redistribution, from the healthy to the sick. No wonder the president insists everyone will be “required” to pay their “premiums” in such a scheme. Why else would anyone continue paying into such a manipulated rip-off?

Of course graduates of the socialist government youth propaganda camps who can’t explain why A must equal A cheer at the notion that “greedy” insurance companies will be required to fund treatment of their emergent diseases at levels that bear no actuarial relation to any premiums they’ve paid in over time.

Where will the money come from? Will such a scheme bankrupt our children and grandchildren? Who cares?!

Then the president had the chutzpah to sneer:

“In 1935, when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away, there were those who argued that Social Security would lead to socialism,” and that “In 1965 … some argued that Medicare represented a government takeover of health care.”

Leave aside, for the moment, how closely this resembles Eugene Lawson in “Atlas Shrugged,” simpering to Hank Rearden “You businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you’ve cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we’ll perish – but we haven’t.”

It’s actually closer to some teen-ager in a monster movie, branding his chums “scaredy-cats” as they bolt for the woods, never noticing the horrid creature shambling up behind him.

“Nyah, nyah, nyah, you say you’re afraid of socialism but we already have Medicare and Social Security,” chant the redistributionists. I have never quite understood how this differs substantially from a ship’s officer ridiculing your fears that the Titanic may sink, even though it’s been taking on water for hours and now lists 30 degrees. After all, “It hasn’t sunk YET!”

Don’t many doctors now see more than half their patients covered by Medicare, meaning the government tells them what treatments they can prescribe and what they’ll be paid — even regularly “adjusting” those payment rates downward, after the fact? But this represents no trend toward government control of the enterprise?

If Social Security and Medicare have not yet converted our entire economy to redistributionist socialism (such failure being the only reason enough tax revenue still flows in to allow Mr. Obama to indulge his fantasies) we should therefore not be worried now that Mr. Obama wants to push the process further — even as our economy, currency, and government debt teeter on the brink of hyperinflation and systemic collapse?