Obamacare is worse than what we have now

James C. Capretta & Yuval Levin:

President Obama's strategy to pass sweeping health care legislation rested on stealth and speed. The idea was to fill the conversation for months on end with vague talk about expanding coverage, "bending the cost-curve," improving quality, and rooting out waste, without showing the public how the plan would actually work or what it would cost. Legislation, meanwhile, would be composed behind closed doors, and the bills would be introduced as close as possible to when they might come up for a vote to minimize the time in which they could actually be read and thought about by those who would vote on them and those who would live under them. By the time the details emerged, maybe momentum and being "closer than ever before" would be enough to overcome the torrent of objections that were sure to be raised when people got a real look at the nuts and bolts.

That moment has now come. House Democrats finally unveiled their plan on July 14, with the aim of passing it by July 31, the last day before the August congressional recess. The Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee has released its part of the plan, but the Finance Committee (which must figure out how to pay for it all) has yet to do so. There, too, the leadership hoped for a vote before the recess.

But things have not gone as the Democrats intended. As details have emerged, an extraordinary wave of public concern has washed over the debate and left the plan's champions reeling. It is all but certain that both the House and Senate will recess for August without voting on health care, despite the president's insistence on its urgency. And the emerging tone of the public debate casts serious doubt on the fate of Obamacare more broadly.

The reasons for the public revolt are easy to see. The Democrats want to spend $1.5 trillion over a decade, impose an $800 billion tax increase in the midst of the worst recession in a generation, increase federal borrowing by $239 billion (on top of the $11 trillion the Obama budget already requires us to borrow through 2019), impose costly mandates on employers that will discourage hiring as unemployment nears 10 percent, force individuals to buy one-size-fits-all government defined insurance, and insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients. All of that would occur whether or not the plan includes a "public option," which at this point it does include and which will exacerbate all of these problems.

As these facts have become clear, Obama's standing has fallen and public opinion has grown decidedly less enthusiastic for the administration's approach. The trend is likely to continue, because the details of the plan reveal that its two most serious drawbacks--its cost and the prospect of government rationing--are worse than even most of their critics have grasped.

First, there are massive hidden costs inherent in a little-understood provision of the plan. The centerpiece of Obamacare is a new premium subsidy program. In the House bill, families with incomes up to four times the poverty level would get a fixed cap on their insurance premiums, tied to their incomes. For instance, a family whose income is twice the poverty level would pay no more than 5 percent of its total income for insurance. But providing that guarantee to all such households in America would cost far more than even the Democrats are willing to propose. The plan therefore would make subsidies available only to households getting insurance through the new "exchanges," insurance pools set up in each state as a parallel system to job-based coverage. And full-time workers in all but the smallest firms would be barred from entering the exchanges, at least for a time, so they wouldn't have access to the new entitlement.

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Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly clear that Obamacare would involve not just rationed care but centrally managed and controlled care....

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There is an interesting excerpt from a book about how logistic decisions on the weather in Russia doomed the German offensive as ill equipped to deal with the freezing conditions. The author also talks about the failure to learn the lessons of Napoleon on a similar expedition.

The Democrats second attempt at health care reform gives the impression of the German army outside Moscow inadequately clothed and floundering for a quick kill that will never come. They seem to think the problems of Hillarycare were tactical, but it was the substance of control freak government that defeated the Democrats in 1994 and that is what is grinding them down now. Even in august there is a definite chill about this plan.