ObamaCare: The Devil's in the Details
Bipartisanship. Transparency. Those hollow campaign promises, which Obama continues to utter with a straight face at every turn, are perhaps not the best nouns for describing his approach to health care reform. The words chosen by James Capretta and Yuval Levin, in an incisive commentary over at The Weekly Standard — stealth and speed – seem far more evocative of Obama’s M.O. At least this was the case up until last week, when ObamaCare ran headlong into a roadblock placed not by Republicans but the President’s fellow Democrats.
“The idea,” Capretta and Levin write, “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.
This was precisely the “strategy,” if it can be called that, Obama used to push through his ill-fated stimulus in record time. But the public is not about to be fooled again. Once the Blue Dogs began protesting, the American people became involved. The veneer on the plan began to chip away, revealing provisions such as the following:
- an expenditure of $1.5 trillion over a decade;
- an $800 billion tax hike in the middle of one of the worst recessions in recent memory;
- an increase in federal borrowing to the tune of $239 billion;
- costly mandates on employers that will lead to a hiring freeze even as unemployment reaches 10 percent.
The fact that passage of any legislation will now be delayed until after the August Congressional recess gives Republicans an opportunity to rub away the rest of the surface paint through well-placed ads.
