I very much doubt that the outmanned troops trapped and facing capture or death at Dunkirk winked at each other [and] said, “Those Nazis have really stepped in it this time. We’ve got’em right where we want’em.”
Thus Robert F Laird of the blog Instapunk, replying to my “in defense of rightwing Leninism” post (which Allahpundit smartly retitled “Don’t despair about Obamacare” at HotAir). Mr. Laird views my position as advocating that we “accept our inevitable strategic defeat on the bill itself and buoy our spirits with dreams of the vengeance to come…” – as against his emphasis on the fight at hand: “If any of those dreams cause us to fight a scintilla less hard against the imminent disaster of passage, I am opposed.”
I cannot agree that a defeat on this health care bill would in itself rise to the strategic level, if by strategic we mean a permanent and definitive political re-alignment in favor of the left, though I do acknowledge that a major tactical setback could take on strategic consequences, or at least that the Obamacrats may be change-and-hoping as much. As Kimberly Strassel argued Friday in the Wall Street Journal, echoing the views of conservatives like Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy, and Mark Levin, liberals may indeed be “think[ing] big”:
The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.
It’s heady stuff for the pages of the WSJ – Obamacare as Cthulhucare – all the stronger coming in the middle of an article devoted to the by now familiar theme of “Democrats’ political suicide” – the raft of polls indicating public rejection of their hyper-partisan, self-aggrandizing and self-dealing, dishonest and tone-deaf approach.
Though many Democrats may believe that the public will come to like their work or at worst put it in perspective by the next and after-the-next elections, and though others may believe they’re simply doing what they were sent to Washington to do, the notion of a long-term strategic view does at least offer a rational explanation for their conduct. In another sense it’s just an uncomplimentary, some might say paranoid, translation of the Democrats’ own self-serving descriptions of their “historic” accomplishment (or near-accomplishment). Where I disagree with Laird and Strassel is that, even if the liberal brain-trust really is thinking along those lines, that doesn’t make their strategic concept right, and it doesn’t mean that this bill (or set of approximations of a bill) will serve their larger strategic purpose effectively.
Health care may be a critical struggle, and a final resolution on the Obamacare-defined front might carry strategic implications, but, for now and for the foreseeable future, it is still only one front in a larger war. As I’ve found myself repeating lately, health care may represent up to 1/5th of the economy, but 5/5ths are at stake. Put simply, we could win this particular battle on health care, and still lose the country. Conversely, we can cede ground on health care legislatively, but, under a stratagem as old as warfare – and fist fights – we may someday gain it back by exploiting the vulnerabilities that the other side’s unsupportable advance has created. Such a tactical reversal could also be of potential strategic significance, but in our favor: These are high-risk maneuvers for both sides, and the signs of over-extension, including but hardly limited to unconstitutional overreaching, in the O-crat salient already go well beyond the poll readings.
In the meantime, openly proclaiming an objective to be essential to the entire effort may persuade our own forces to fight harder today, but it puts us in an even worse position if tomorrow Healthcare Hill is still in the Obamacrats’ possession. After declaring the battle essential and seeing it lost, what would we say to our surviving troops? In this light, it shouldn’t surprise us if, wherever this discussion is playing out under the prospect of final passage, voices not just of outrage but of total surrender, or, what amounts to the same thing, of sedition and rebellion, are already sounding out. And why should the soldiers trust us the next time we say, “We really mean it this time – this is THE battle”? On the other hand, if a late access of public outrage and Democratic fratricide collapses the project at the 11th legislative hour, or if other forces intervene, are we to de-mobilize, thinking the war is won, leaving the GOP professionals to do the mopping up?
Just after I read Instapunk’s reply yesterday, I was amused to see that Dick Morris had also taken up the Dunkirk theme, re-casting the close of Churchill’s immortal speech following the British army’s rescue, looking to the struggle ahead:
If they beat us in the Senate, we will fight them in conference. If they beat us in conference, we will fight them in the House. If they beat us in the House over healthcare, we will fight them over cap and trade. We will fight them over immigration and amnesty. We will fight them over the deficit. We will fight them over the debt. And we will fight them in 2010. We will fight them in the House. We will fight them for Senate seats in Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and Arkansas. We will fight them in Colorado and North Dakota and California and Washington State. We will fight them in Illinois and in New Jersey. We will never, never, never, never give up! Our country is at stake!
I’d much rather have American patriots responding with such defiance and determination than have had Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor, or any other senator or party chair or pundit or blogger or commenter, sorrowfully describing what this bill “will” do to health care, to our seniors, to the states, to the economy, to our national future and to the most intimate decisions of our personal lives. Until the day the bill is enacted, fully implemented (sometime around 2016, apparently), and really paid for not just once or for few years but sustainably, there is no “will,” there is only what it “would do” (or would have done).
McConnell’s more recent comments to the National Review – looking forward to the cavalry’s arrival come 2010, promising that health care would be a “multi-cycle” issue – were much better. I was also glad to hear Republican Chairman Michael Steele take up the repeal theme, and to watch Karl Rove receiving an “amen” from conservative über-pessmist Mark Steyn on the idea that the Democrats may have unintentionally done wonders for the cause of individual freedom, by setting themselves up for an amplified version of the revolt that killed the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage act of 1988 one year after passage. Jay Cost’s recent post on the historical precedents for a populist ballot box revolution against the Obamacrats is also well worth reading.
Though the despairing cry of “once passed, it’s forever” will still be heard from the mouths of those who’ve been told as much over and over by well-meaning rightwing seers, it is not supported by the full historical record – nor can anything be proven (too few data points, no inertial frame) by reference to the relatively short political history of major American entitlement programs. However things turn out on this bill, I reject “nothing you can do about it” as an American answer to any inequity, any form of tyranny, or any governmental excess. Asserting the impossibility of correcting legislative error may sound wisely cynical, but it presumes the end of American democracy, the falsification of the very theory of America. If we can’t take our fate into our own hands, and trust ourselves to do whatever we finally need to do, whether others including ourselves have ever done it before or not, then, with or without Obamacare, we’ve already seceded from America, from any idea of republican democracy, whatever we decide to call our new, shrunken state of existence.
Let the Democrats take ownership of divisive, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic policy and politics. American conservatives are the ones who are supposed to believe in and stand ready to protect constitutional government, and on a fundamental level that means we must believe there is nothing that an American government can do wrong that Americans cannot fix. Assuming as much doesn’t weaken us for the present struggle: It’s the basis of the struggle and why we fight.
Comments 56
Thank God there’s no further hero worship for Ben Nelson. He is a total jerk.
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:32 pm
“Let the Democrats take ownership of divisive, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic and anti-representative policy and politics. American conservatives are the ones who are SUPPOSED to believe in and stand ready to protect constitutional government and its imperfect solutions, and on a fundamental level that means we believe there is nothing that an American government can do wrong that Americans cannot fix. Assuming as much doesn’t weaken us for the present struggle: It’s the basis of the struggle and why we fight.”
This is a mega-mouthful,even in Zombie land. And how is Universal HealthCare “divisive, anti-constitutional, anti-democratic and anti-representative…” Of Course,this healthcare plan is a monumental abortion,excluding Abortion, (even when it is rarely medically necessary).The Way the Healthcare Bill should have been framed is MEDICARE FOR EVERYONE,YES or NO. And we would live with a democratic answer to that proposition. Or we could make Universal Health Care unconstitutional by an amendment to the constitution forbiding it. If that happened,however,inevitably, another amendment would quash that Amendment,and so it goes. For that matter,we could always add an Amendment outlawing Abortion throughout the land etc etc. (It sounds a bit like Hegelian Dialect).
I am constantly amazed by the inability of many Conservatives to accept that it was the Republicans,Democrats,Liberals,and Conservatives, whose combined Economic insanity has put the nation in great jeopardy,and who exactly is going to fix it? LOL at the very thought that the Feds or the Fed will save our fiscal Bacon.
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
That maybe so, Rex, but the question is what to doa about it now, this bill operates like a computer virus, disabling some functions like the task manager (profit motive, hippocratic oath) and writing new code (death panels, price controls, admission quotas) et al. So it must confronted and rooted out, these next few years, before implementation
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
@ narciso:
You actually wrote… death panels!!!
Gonna be another third of a quart jar full.
A B
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
@ Rex Caruthers:
I agree that conservatives – depending on how you define “conservatives” – have a hard time taking their share of responsibility, but, as narciso says, that’s history.
You ask:
And then you give a generalized answer in the next sentence:
In the abstract, I suppose there is no essential reason why the notion of universal health care should be all those things, but I’m not even attempting to address that question. I’m addressing the process and the various versions of O-care that we’ve seen.
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
narciso wrote:
That maybe so, Rex, but the question is what to doa about it now, this bill operates like a computer virus, disabling some functions like the task manager (profit motive, hippocratic oath) and writing new code (death panels, price controls, admission quotas) et al. So it must confronted and rooted out, these next few years, before implementation
Two remedies,an amendment to the constitution or the Supreme Court withs its Five to Four “Conservative” edge,or Elect a Conservative Congress in 2010 & Conservative President in 2012 ,and wipe the bill out and start from Scratch. Again,LOL to all the remedies.
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Rex Caruthers wrote:
Yes, I think that’s at least one issue that’s been taken care of quite nicely. Good chance ol’ Ben himself will be taken care of quite nicely, too.
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
You could call it by its name in the stimulus bill, are you sure you want to refer to the FCCER. Now the backstop has to be to block the likes of another Sotomayor from the Court strictly on constitutional grounds. And we need a better crop of Senators then the crew who would given half the chance, have left
the line at Thermopylae, to get some freshly
killed goat, back home
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
@ narciso:
I don’t mind you using the term as long as we’re clear that you know that it’s a joke.
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I wish it were froggy, but sadly the organization that sounds like the airplane manufacturer is very much real. Much like the British NICE, something very much out of C.S. Lewis.
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:09 pm
@ narciso:
narc, if you enter a vegetative state and are unable to move, communicate, or respond to stimuli, do you wish for us to do everything possible to preserve you in a life-like state?
Should you be unable to eat or to breathe by yourself, do you wish for us to assist you to do so for an unlimited time?
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I don’t want the government to decide froggy, and those are the strings attached with govt. Funding, including an advisor at the OMB who has problems with the Hippocratic oath. Besides the FCCER is about courses of treatment, not just efforts to keeping the patient strictly alive
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:24 pm
@ narciso:
narc, you’re fantasizing. If you’re competent, nobody but you decides. The whole damn point of it is to insure that somebody gets your decision on paper so that if you lose the ability to answer the question, your wishes are obvious and can be followed instead of having a proxy answer for you.
Where do you come up with the idea that the government decides?
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:30 pm
No, that was what Sarah’ s proclamation was about, bur not Earl Blumenauer who put the provision in the bill, you know Oregon where mercy killing is an art form. Now back to the main point, this thing doesn’t really substantially expand the number of doctors, it cuts reinbursement rates, it imposes auditing on businesses who self insure, and a thousand other odds and ends that don’t belong in this bill, pr any other such contraption
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:04 pm
@ narciso:
Sarah Palin, joke of the year for that one.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/dec/18/lie-year-runners-up/
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:11 pm
I can’t tell you how I am impressed with politifact and their completely objective, un-self-interested analysis.
The whole bill is one gigantic death panel.
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:22 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
I can’t tell you how impressed I am with your impression.
Palin was a flaming bag of halloween shoe scrapings with that one.
( and I sure as hell am not going to defend the bill, CK. )
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Yes, the folks who ‘fact checked’ the SNL sketch on Obama, one of their earlier offerings
was the admission that her cap n trade op ed
for the post was correct, but she didn’t write
it, as if she hadn’t used the same rationale in her op ed to the Times the year before.
Actually the ‘puzzlebox of death,’ from the Hellraiser series is a better metaphor, but you understand that better, CK
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Palin had to walk it back and say that it shouldn’t be taken literally, narc.
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Yes, the proof that Politifacts, relied on, is a part of the quote, and a statement from Obama which reveals more of his intent, then
again he thinks doctors chop off limbs, remove tonsils with relish. No actual context to the statement.
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:50 pm
this “tonsils with relish” another French food joke?
December 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Death Panel, be not proud,
though they have enacted thee.
Mighty and dreadful, thou art so;
For those whom thou overthrow
Die and suffer, cowed;
but yet thou cannot named be.
What’s in a name?
A panel by any other name can wreak equal woe.
A soothing name carries no shame.
Tis not thy name that makes thee man’s potent enemy.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
@ fuster:
That’s not walking anything back, that’s explaining descriptive political rhetoric to the imagination-impaired.
One of the funniest, and in its own way most illuminating, spectacles of the year was watching sundry wonks and academics saying there wasn’t anything that went by the name of “death panel” in the bill as though that somehow defended Obamacare and revealed a terrible truth about Palin.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:02 pm
@ Sully:
A twofer!
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:03 pm
@ narciso:
Somehow I don’t think puzzlebox of death would be as catchy as death panel, but, if I had the photoshop skills, I’d do Harry Reid up as this guy:
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Bravo, Sully, I used the same phraseology with regards to the Cairo speech, where there weredenunciations of ‘torture’, probably within in earshot of ‘the Citadel’ that Saracen era fortress where rusty meat hooks and pulling finger nails, are standard interrogation practices, and they do that with ‘relish’ two.Besides now that Sarkozy is President over Chirac, we fly the French tricolor now. BTWare there any SFW pics of Mad. Bruni that we can put on the Wall
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Yeah, you’re right about that. She was walking it back so that the majority of her backers would stop mindlessly agreeing with the literal meaning and repeating the stupidity as if it wasn’t literally nonsense.
I would assume that the delay was caused by her being incapacitated by the surgeries, and not by needing to have someone explain to her what she was supposed to have meant.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:11 pm
@ Sully:
Damn, you’re on a roll lately, you dirty cheesepoet.
Bravo.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:14 pm
@ fuster:
No one who didn’t hold several advanced degrees was stupid enough to believe that there was an entity called “Death Panel” in the bill. Find one piece of evidence to the contrary.
Surgeries?
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:19 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Sorry Tsar, people quite literally believed that to be their function, and the aim of the provision, not their designation.
(cosmetic, kinda like that Biden guy underwent, just a bit more extensive)
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:25 pm
No, as usual the delay was in writing another post with all the requisite footnotes, like this most recent offering:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/sarah-palin/midnight-votes-backroom-deals-and-a-death-panel/213042303434
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Don’t know what you’re talking about in re surgeries. Guess I missed that story.
You can choose to believe whatever you want, I guess, about what Palin said and how it was received. In my view it was completely within bounds, and I’m not really sure what you think the incorrect “literal” interpretation of the phrase was, and what was untrue about it.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:34 pm
@ narciso:
I doubt that ms Palin spent much time on her portion of the facebook post.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:34 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Good. I’m ready to stop talking about it.
From the start, I merely wished to be sure that narciso understood that death panels was a bit of political nonsense, not something real or something to fear.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:38 pm
A dirty little secret. Every health care system has a “death panel” under some name.
Our current system rations care partly by ability to pay and partly by luck of the draw. A national single payor system will ration by restricting the availability of certain kinds of specialists and by slowing the introduction of certain kinds of technologies and/or pharmaceuticals because of cost.
The very rich, the famous and the politically connected will get better access, as they do now; but even they will be worse off as incentives for other than showing up for “work” atrophy over time.
This is why Canadians denied certain kinds of care by waiting lists come to the US and pay their own way.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:42 pm
No, I wish it were nonsense, but fine if you have parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts,
(I’m assuming you weren’t hatched, Kermit)
have them look forward to this plan in three
years.
December 22nd, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Perhaps we have not seen the beginning of the end. But we might see, in dim outline, the end of the beginning.
If we’re going to be all Churchillian about it.
It’s not that I think CK, or The Other Guy for that matter, is “wrong.” But I think we do have to acknowledge that in all wars, the loss of major battles, and setbacks from major objectives, produce material changes in what is to be won, and how hard the fight will ultimately be.
Before Dunkirk, the BEF was still on the Continent and Hitler did not hold the Continent from the Channel ports to Poland’s eastern border. After Dunkirk he did hold the Continent — and the character of the objective to “defeat Hitler” was transformed.
Of course, part of the transformation had begun a decade before. Battles not even “fought” — battles evaded, in the interest of “peace in our time” — had helped to set up everything represented by Dunkirk.
But that context doesn’t negate the reality that all losses and retreats change the nature of the conflict, and revise what will be required to come back and win it.
The comparison to Dunkirk is apt, because if the houses of Congress do reconcile, and send Obama a punitive health-care-killing tax package to sign in early 2010, that WILL be a strategic reversal, just as Dunkirk was. The loss of position for those who advocate liberty will have to be addressed in any counter-campaign. As with the evacuation from Dunkirk, a Democratic win on this will mean the right has to recover lost ground, at painful expense and in circumstances that will present options even less obvious than the strategic options for the Allies in WWII.
There is no question that pushing Hitler back from the Low Countries in 1940 would have been a proposition very different from invading German-held Africa in 1942, invading German-fortified Italy in 1943, invading German-held Normandy in 1944, and fighting the Wehrmacht into Germany inch by bloody inch from the West and the East. If the forces had been in place to achieve the former — that dreamy vision of fighting Hitler back in 1940 — the latter would probably not have ever been necessary.
Dunkirk wasn’t fatal to the West, but it took years of bloody fighting, billions in treasure, and the lives of millions to recover from it. The recovery wasn’t, in fact, a recovery at all, but the inauguration of a new political order. People were right to look at Dunkirk and be uneasy about the last whimper it represented of an old, familiar order — and about what it meant for their future.
Just so is it right to view this terrible “health care” legislation as a game-changer. We have never recovered from legislation of this sweeping kind; we have instead been transformed. The options for the opposition are no longer the same ones, once a reconciled bill is signed. We will find that merely repealing “the bill” isn’t possible, even in the unlikely event the GOP attains the numbers needed in 2010 to override a presidential veto. The terms of winning and losing will have changed, and will keep changing with every passing day as paid and dependent constituencies are cultivated around “health care” collectivism.
Like many people, I expect, I’m willing to hear from anyone who has a good idea about what we should do. Of course, I don’t assume that “all is lost” if the Democrats do ram a bill through and get it signed. That’s an a priori attitude that’s independent of specific circumstance. But the terms of the conflict — objectives, starting positions, advantage, disadvantage, strategy, timeline, measures of effectiveness — will all have changed.
That’s why the Democrats are pushing so hard to get this through. Republicans have, much like the England and France of the 1930s, allowed their position to be eroded, hoping for a little peace; and as literally as England could not fight the blitzkrieg in the Low Countries in 1940, Republicans this month cannot prevent passage of the Senate bill. The Democrats are trying to take advantage of that, in a manner similar to Hitler’s lightning war in the late spring of 1940.
Sure, Hitler overextended himself. But it’s easy to assume in hindsight that the moral will was there all along to fight the unprecentedly enormous war that was required to unextend him. In June of 1940, no one even knew what that war would look like. Not Churchill himself.
Are Americans willing to fight the political equivalent of WWII to defeat the hounds of hell the Democrats’ health-control plans would unleash on us? That remains to be seen. No one has offered a vision yet of what such a fight will look like.
An attenuated version occurred, we might say, with the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, some of whose provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1936. So maybe one effort in the campaign will have to be judicial challenges. But in the larger scheme of things, much more government interventionism, regarding price-setting and industrial regulation, survived from both the Wilson years and the FDR years, than was invalidated by the courts. Hardly any was ever repealed by later Congresses. All of the income tax, Social Security, and Medicare started out to be very “limited” programs of specific scope, but have metastasized, turned into a basis for governance, and become impossible to repeal.
Given these realities, what I’m most interested in hearing is constructive proposals for fighting the new conflict we will have if Obama gets something to sign in 2010. Anyone with a vision, please step forward and start talking.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Somber words, J.E,I don’t know anymore, the more people don’t want it, the more they push it. Seeing as the poison will take a few years to settle in the system, while all these taxes and regulations come into being, maybe there is a hope there. Much like the equally onerous cap n trade regime, which they want to impose on us as well. It’s probably pointless to argue with Michigan J as much as with the French version on the other blog. The system does need reform in some areas, exactly the ones were there is no interest in proceeding.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:29 pm
It’s worth noting that Smidge has the meaning of “death panel” wrong anyway. “Death panel” doesn’t refer to end-of-life counseling, it refers to the medical practices board that will choose not to fund treatments that extend life less than other treatments. What this amounts to in practice, by definition, is funding less treatment for old people, who live for fewer years after treatments because they’re old.
This board, which will look at the “economics” of various kinds of treatment for all the ills on the books, is in both the House and Senate bills. It’s the essential entity that will be charged with “bending the cost curve” — a vague and misleading characterization, since it’s not possible for government to make anything cost less than it costs. All government can do is decree that less will be spent on something. That’s what this board will do: decree that the least “cost-effective” treatments will be defunded.
In practice that will mean that neither Medicare nor Medicaid will pay for them, and any private insurance plans that cover them will be considered “Cadillac” plans, and will be taxed accordingly. The effect will be to make it increasingly difficult for anyone who isn’t absolutely rich to obtain such treatments.
There are plenty of medical procedures that people don’t survive by a lot of years. Most medical procedures are performed on old people to begin with. Whether it’s hip replacements or bypass surgery, deciding to defund categories of treatment on a cost-effectiveness basis, and penalize people for wanting to retain access to such treatment through their private insurance, is tantamount to acting as a death panel.
Government could release its own upward pressure on health care costs, and that would be a good thing. But government pretending to “bend the cost curve” can only mean government preferring the low dollar cost of death (or unnecessary suffering, or impaired quality of life) over the higher cost of treatment. That’s a death panel.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm
The Dunkirk meme is as analogy bad,
Tis readily seen vice Stalingrad,
The one was withdrawal after sore defeat,
The other total loss of all who were beat.
From the Dunkirk beaches streamed three hundred thou,
Who fought again once replenished enow,
While from Stalingrad’s streets not a one was saved,
For there the victor more smartly behaved.
The crucial question vis health care bill,
Is whether the Dems can cinch the kill.
A bridge too far the bill may be,
We must work and act and wait and see,
If the wind they’ve just sown,
Will rebound on their own.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:42 pm
I did see “Atonement” last year, and it gave a more visceral understanding of what Dunkirk was like. We have an object lesson to how the curve is bent sometimes in the HMO, don’t we.
‘pre-existing conditions’ limiting your choice of doctor and the benefits provided by, led in partto the 12 million uninsured, and this demand we’ve had at least since 1988
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
You sound too sad to even debate this stuff with, Dyer.
Some other time for the death panels.
This mess of a bill is going to pass the Senate on the 24th.
Something like it is going to get signed.
It’s not going to get thrown out.
It’s a clunker that’s going to have to be pounded into shape and/or replaced part by part.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
You can’t fix a lemon, Kermit, you eventually have to junk it, specially after you poured
magnesium silicate into the engine bloc
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:04 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
Hey, JED – long time, no see – good to hear from you.
I’m wondering whether you’ve read the prior two posts that started this exchange with Instapunk, who represents one of two positions that I’m arguing are untenable – “It’s already over” and “It will be over with this vote.”
The military metaphors are easy to overstrain, and even easier to overindulge in. Politics can be a lot more fluid. I don’t consider the Dunkirk comparison a very good one on its own terms, since it isolates one theater at a peculiar point long before all of the major combatants were involved. For all we know the better comparison is Marcus Crassus marching his splendid legion into the Parthian trap, or Hitler or Bonaparte marching into Russia.
As you well know, ol’ Crassus covered quite a lot of ground before he ended up, as the story goes, having molten gold poured down his throat. Since I see little sign on the Republicans’ side of skillful Parthian tactics and planning, I tend to think the Russian comparisons are better (plus we already have HP’s graphic of Napoleonobama to decorate our investigations). The sheer weight of potential resistance to the Obamacare scheme would correspond to the vastness of Russian land and population.
You know how those operations went, and can probably draw up some more heartening parallels better than I can, if you’re of a mind to.
I’ll put it this way: This is Reid, Pelosi, and Obama’s bill. IF by this time next year, well actually a bit later, Reid is no longer a Senator, Pelosi no longer Speaker, and Obama is at or below his current popularity, overwhelmed by a populist conservative wave, then implementation can be stalled in any number of ways involving tax and budgetary measures. Much will likely depend on factors we can only guess at now, but it seems highly unlikely that Obama will be able to submit a budget and tax regime remotely satisfactory to the expectations of voters behind a sustained conservative wave, least of all while protecting an unpopular, not yet implemented program whose repeal was a chief demand of the forces that have deprived him of allies.
Who exactly are the client constituencies supposed to be that would prevent this from occurring? We’re still shooting at a moving target, but who are you imagining will be receiving a benefit, and refusing to give it up, prior to 2014 or even beyond that point? Why wouldn’t there be far larger numbers of people seeking relief?
Whatever this monstrosity is, it’s not Social Security and it’s not Medicare. It has a much different structure and is in the process of being passed under much different political and economic circumstances.
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:05 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
That capsulizes the best reason for hope. In grinding this out against time and tide the Dems have created two separate hashes of furballs and dog’s vomit that are each attackable at a thousand points and defensible at none of them. Sheer momentum and exhaustion may carry them to passage of some bastardized reconciliation of the two unsavory messes; but nobody except the manufactured crowd will be cheering when President Obama holds the signing ceremony. If he does that Mussolini thrust with his chin after he signs the event will be letter perfect.
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
@ narciso:
Well, yeah, but. Nothing we do in America today is a result of the natural forces of the market. That most definitely applies to both “health insurance” and HMOs.
One of the very few things Michael Moore got right in his documentary Sicko was identifying the Nixon administration (and Nixon’s Congresses, of course) as the author(s) of the HMO, and as the politicians who envisioned channeling the majority of Americans into “cost-efficient coverage.” HMOs didn’t arise naturally; they had to be midwifed by the federal government.
There was a time before employers were kicked and pummeled into collective insurance/health plan schemes for their employees, when people did this unthinkable thing: they bought their own health insurance, and it was actual “insurance.”
Covering preexisting conditions isn’t even “insurance” at all. It’s a misnomer to call it that. Covering preexisting conditions is analogous to having a guarantee that your house is insured when it has already burned down, or that your auto is insured if you’ve already totalled it -ie., even if you haven’t purchased a policy. It’s oxymoronic. “Insurance” isn’t the thing that relieves you of a financial burden when a problem already exists. When that happens, it’s because a sugar daddy has stepped in — or maybe your real Daddy, who knows.
“Insurance” is something you buy in case a problem arises. The reason it can be affordable for most people is that the problems it covers usually don’t arise. Insurance companies (and HMOs) can reliably predict how much they’ll have to spend on claims, given their covered clientele, over time.
When you add people with preexisting conditions to the mix, what you’re adding is guaranteed claim payments. That means everyone’s premiums will have to go up, because the likelihood of claims payments has skyrocketed.
Nothing forces us to commit the error of pretending that people with preexisting conditions can be “insured” in the same way as people without them. But demagogues keep trying to dragoon everyone in the population into the same kind of “coverage.” If our politicians hadn’t forced HMOs on employers back in the 70s and 80s, and if our states weren’t so busy forcing everyone to buy a lot of coverage he doesn’t want or need (e.g., coverage for cosmetic surgery, sex-change operations, mental health treatment, etc), current insurance premiums wouldn’t be as expensive as they are.
But no one understands that our existing system is heavily regulated, and presents a set of incentives and punishments that reward insurance companies and HMOs for behaving exactly as they do.
If the regulations we live under were removed, health insurance would probably revert to looking much as it did in the 1960s and before. What people did then was buy catastrophic coverage, or what was commonly called “hospitalization,” and pay for routine office visits and medications out of pocket. Old people paid higher premiums. Smokers paid higher premiums. Overweight people paid higher premiums. This wasn’t considered discriminatory or mean-spirited, it was considered sensible. Even people with some (not all) preexisting conditions could get insurance coverage — for catastrophic hospitalization — if they were willing to pay high enough premiums. It was also understood (it was written into policies) that you were covered up to a certain maximum amount, and the insurance company was not obliged to keep paying and paying and paying because you were sick and still alive.
Today’s political concept of “health care” is fuzzy and emotional. People think it’s horribly mean of insurance companies to not pay for everything that could possibly be done for someone, but instead to adhere to the provisions of the insured’s policy. People think it’s just terrible that those with preexisting conditions can’t get insurance — but they never stop to think about how their own premiums MUST go up, if the cost of treating people with chronic conditions is to be spread across the population through the insurance mechanism.
As far as I’m concerned, what we need to drop, first and foremost, is the idiotic and unsustainable concept of everyone being “covered” for health care on the same basis. We can’t possibly make all health care coverage outcomes the same anyway. It’s a literal impossibility, and it’s most certainly not worth the cost of our individual liberty.
Instead, we need to release the pressure of government regulation and cost-shifting on the health insurance system itself, and let it settle out through market forces by serving the large middle-class majority that would choose to carry catastrophic insurance. John McCain’s proposals would have gone a long way toward achieving this goal.
To help the indigent, I am a fan of county hospitals and clinics. I don’t have a problem with assisting the poor in getting health care through government action, but (a) it needs to be done at the closest level possible to the people paying for it, and
it should not be administered as if the poor are making claims on “insurance.” The vast majority of Americans move from poor to middle-class over their lifetimes anyway, and what we all should be doing is paying for our own insurance, which we choose in order to cover the things we want to cover. There is no reason why public assistance health care should be administered as if its recipients are “just like” people who pay for their routine care, their meds, and their insurance. The way to be “just like” the paying people is to pay.
For people with tough-to-cover preexisting conditions, I’ve come to favor the concept of the state-level high-risk pool, which would provide assistance in the form of vouchers. I do think local and state governments can have a role in assisting such people. But payments should be made to medical practitioners and hospitals, and there should be no burgeoning bureaucracy as there is in too many states, where the state has become the employer of first resort for medical practitioners in some unique specialties — and has developed whole new areas of professional “specialty” in which it proposes to employ people at taxpayer expense, on the theory that there will be a permanent clientele of the dependent.
The way health care is run and paid for in America today is entirely dictated and distorted by the actions of government. It’s not too much to say that government is to blame for everything we don’t like about our health care system. HMOs and insurance companies are way down on my list of the “at fault.” It’s only because of government regulation and mandates that most of us “have” to deal with them at all. It IS possible for things to be different, and the main thing that has to change is how much the federal and state governments are involved in “health care.”
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:36 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Nice to be back, CKM. We’ll see how long the hand can hang in there.
As you say, politics and war are different. (Even Clausewitz agreed.) My point remains valid, whether we concur on the Dunkirk analogy or not: there are excellent reasons to predict that people’s approach to fighting health-care-killing legislation will be different from their approach to fighting invasion by Napoleon or Hitler.
Do you really expect Americans to execute a scorched-earth defense against the attack on both our health care and our liberty? How will that go, exactly?
It’s not that I think there’s nothing that can be done, or that “The world will come to an end!” if Obama signs some abomination in 2010. I think you understand that you’re not arguing against that, as my proposition.
But health-care-killing legislation isn’t likely to have the same effect on the people, in terms of galvanizing them to risk losing everything, to fight to the death, to gnaw off their own limbs to get out of the trap — whatever analogy we want to invoke here — that invasion by Napoleon had on the Russians.
People across America are galvanized today; but to do what?
In one sense I’m trying to get folks here to think and make suggestions, as I feel out my own position. We need a blueprint for action here. No big strategic defeat in history “just happened,” or was inevitable; it was brought about by what opponents were willing to do, by the decisions they made, their plan of action and their reactions. If the Russians had not been willing to burn Moscow down rather than see Napoleon invest it — well, it would have taken longer to rout him, and been a different proposition in a number of ways. (Some analysts think if Napoleon could just have taken Moscow intact he could have consolidated his advance into Russia and wintered there safely. Maybe; I’m not so sure; but in any event, fighting to undermine his hold on an occupied Moscow would have been a different situation and required a different Russian strategy; much would have depended on the attitude of the Czar; time would have shifted in Napoleon’s favor at least tactically, etc, etc, etc. No point in developing every thought down a winding alley here; I think you get my point.)
So when you say the weight of resistance will correspond to the vastness of Russia, what practical manifestations do you project that to have, in the next decade in the US of A? It was one thing to have tea parties when King George was on the other side of the pond, and nutty as a fruitcake, but the consequences of civil disobedience in the matter of health care regulation will be of a much different and more immediate character.
This is a serious question, not meant to be a rhetorical trump card or a stumper. What do we need to get Congress to do, to stop this train before it leaves the station, presumably in FY2011?
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:08 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
Well, this is the danger of military analogies: No one on either side, at least one may hope, is directly risking death in the fight.
I’ve tried to stress in all of my posts on this subject that the economic dimension will be critical, not just as a political factor in the conventional sense of “people feel prosperous/reward incumbent.” We can at best only guess now what unemployment, inflation, and interest rates will be 10 months from now or 2 years and 10 months from now.
Generally speaking, if Obamanomics is perceived to have worked well, then there won’t likely be enough of a conservative wave to reverse it. If Obamanomics including this health care plan and whatever else the Ds manage to do works well enough so that Obamaism is sustainable economically and politically… then a lot us here are wrong about a lot of things.
Without going into detail, to the extent that Obamanomics is perceived as unsatisfactory, then a chief tactic would be to ties its failings to critical aspects of O-care.
At the same time, O-care itself is already being perceived as a product of corruption. Do read Jay Cost’s piece linked above on the Jacksonian moment if you haven’t.
Potential wild cards – a war, some other catastrophe – are likely to make implementation more difficult, not less, again for budgetary reasons. Impending budgetary shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security raise the question of why we’re planning to spend the easiest but still painful savings and tax increases on a new entitlement rather than on fixing the old ones.
Assuming that worse comes to worst next month, there will be an actual bill and an actual scheme of implentation: It will become more clear how exactly the pot of gold is going to be accumulated and sequestered.
Just for the sake of organizing issues and approaches, consider one scenario: Suppose it’s 2011, and controlling majorities in the House and Senate are working to gut O-care: They’ve redirected funds appropriated for its implementation to other purposes (deficit reduction, tax relief, etc.), and have rescinded criticial aspects of it that fall within a budgetary framework – including the hated mandate and taxes. Meanwhile, a simple, understandable, popular, budget neutral health care plan is readied similar to the McCain ‘08 proposal or others offered this year in the House.
Independently, formal repeals of O-care are being readied or offered in both houses.
Maybe, with a presidential veto and budget shutdown drama looming, the two sides work out a compromise that further delays implementation of O-care, salvaging some remnant or residue – or re-authorization mechanism that some future president or congress might be able to initiate under a defined set of circumstances under a pay-go scheme. In return, the president agrees to the McCain ‘08 plan or some version of it.
The compromise satisfies no one, and in 2012 health care is again a major issue.
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:04 am
Much like Edward Bellamy thought the collection of American industry into the hands of the trusts would lead to socialism, I fear HMO’s and other artifices have paid the way for this other leviathan. Nixon’s compromises in’71, something McCain might have very well done as well, is a lesson.
If this is true, CK, and I don’t doubt it with this crew,Then it will be up to a dynamic candidate to press the point for real reform
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:53 am
Couldn’t agree more. Many people who roll their eyes when the topic comes to “politics”, have been awakened to the stakes involved and the seriousness of beating these bastards back.
If American political history had had such defeatism in it, we’d still have slavery and the nay-sayers would be Whigs and No-Nothings.
NOTHING is permanent in politics but turmoil and change.
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:32 am
The fear is that once more citizens are receiving money from the government than are paying, it will be very difficult if not impossible to withdraw those entitlements. One look at the outrage over Medicare cuts will tell you why. People will vote out politicians that take money away as long as they think it’s coming out of someone else’s pocket. There is rioting in the streets in France because they are considering going back to a 40 hour workweek instead of 32.
We do have an out on health care since the taxes start four years before the payments, meaning no entrenched benificiaries to oppose conservatives. That and the blatent unconstitutionality of the individual mandate. Hopefully the Supreme Court takes seriously their responsibility to protect us from government overreach.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:02 am
I think our number one goal must be to build opposition to this by repeatedly and clearly articulating to the little guy exactly how this legislation endangers their liberty and risks their health. There are so many scary things in this bill I really think all but the most rabid progressives will be outraged once they understand it. The average guy on the street really does think insurance companies are run by heartless bas&$):; that take glee in their pain and make vast profits. We need to educate them. According to the IRS, health insurers had profit margins of 3%. they also don’t understand what the removal of 200 billion a year will do to jobs in the private sector. Obama is Hoover all over again, actually delaying economic recovery through incompetence and constant shifting of the rules of the game. Few people, even the smartest, can decide where to safely invest capital. I say quit whining and start educating.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:21 am
BTW, I just finished the Hayward book on Reagan, and in passing he brought up another entitlement that was cut rather significantly – not by Reagan himself, but in a manner Reagan had originally proposed: Welfare, a national level/state-administered entitlement with a clearly designated set of beneficiaries. The liberals did scream and yell when Welfare Reform was passed in ‘96. By 2008, the total number of welfare recipients nationwide had been cut in half.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:23 am
@ Dave C:
Assuming no 11th hour rescues, once a bill is passed and signed – now they’re saying February at the earliest – and once its implementation (on the financing side) has begun – it will be a lot easier to be specific.
Since majorities, super-majorities, and superduper-majorities already oppose the bill as a whole, the way it was handled, and particular provisions, the objective is to clinch the argument with ugly facts and most obscene provisions, but I think just as much with a clear commitment not just to kill the bill but to replace it with widely supported reforms.
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:40 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Which puts the peak of anger at all the little multi hundred million dollar quirks that are found in about April or May. A whole lot of Democrats in Red States are making a bet on that anger being defused within a few months.
The Tea Party organizers are no doubt planning. It’s going to be a long, hot summer.
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:54 am
@ Sully:
Burn, Sully Quick, Burn.
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
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