Half Way There

Like the rest of the DC/NY liberal axis, Michael Kinsley is trying to figure out how it happened. How did the "black" FDR go from cheering throngs in Grant Park to a 50% approval rating and angry town hall meetings? Kinsley shares his party's disdain for obstructionist voters, but he also comes close to diagnosing the problems, not just of Obamacare, but also the other sweeping legislative initiatives that progressives favor: Health Care: Americans Want Change While Keeping the Status Quo

The reason Americans have turned against health-care reform, after electing President Obama in part for promising it, is simple: Despite protestations to the contrary, Americans don't like change. You wouldn't know it, of course, if you listen to politicians in high-pander mode, or to talk radio hosts of the right or TV pundits of the left. Or, for that matter, if you listened to the president of the United States. You would think that while we might disagree about what kind of change we want, Americans are in total agreement that the current situation is intolerable in all areas and that change -- big, immediate change -- is essential. Americans do agree about this -- in the abstract. But as soon as it seems that change might actually happen -- as soon as we leave the abstract for the particular -- we panic. We suddenly develop nostalgia for the comforts of the status quo. Sure, we want change -- as long as everything can stay just as it is.

Kinsley knows his audience, so he is quick to bring up the depradations of Bill Kristol and "talk radio" in laying blame for the failing prospects of progressive health care reform. But he also notes that progressive health care reform became unpopular precisely at the moment when the sweeping promises of the campaign gave way to the legisalative reality of death panels, the public option, IRS enforcement of insurance mandates, major cuts in end-of-life care, and all the rest.

Yes, of course, the opposition party has gotten away with some grotesque misrepresentations. But that will always be true as you move from the abstract to the particular. There will always be a Betsy McCaughey sharpening her pencils and cackling as she underlines promising sub-clauses. And she will always find something. Obama thought he could avoid this by not supplying the document. He thought -- hell, we all thought -- that Hillary Clinton's big mistake in the 1990s was too much detail. Obama said he would leave all that up to Congress. But at some point, you've got to show your hand. All Obama seems to have achieved in the end was a shift in timing -- and not an advantageous one. Instead of being in trouble almost from the beginning, his reform remained popular until it was time for Congress to vote.

Kinsley hits the nail on the head, even while he is swinging from the side. Voters certainly do support health care reform. But, what they do not support is the sort of top-down socialization of the American health care system complete with 1000 page, unread legislation that dares to nitpick relations between patients and doctors. Kinsley blithely makes fun of Betsy McCaughey looking through sub-clauses of proposed legislation, which is either disingenuous or profoundly ignorant on his part.

It's disingenuous because those sub-parts will become law just as surely as the "big" parts that everyone professes to love. These "obscure" sub-parts are also potentially subject to broad interpretation by courts and bureaucrats, just as surely as abortion became a constitutional right. If they will be the law, then Betsy McCaughey, or whomever, is right to find them and critique them. We've had a lot of sweeping legislation passed over the last 40 years and the common experience with all of them is this: they cost much more than their advocates promise and they reach into people's personal lives much more than anyone dreamed.

People are fine with health care reform. They have been screaming for it for almost 20 years. But the only proposals put forward have been these sorts of socialization programs that would add a new entitlement on top of the many others already on the books, that would profoundly alter the patient-doctor relationship, and would be accomplished through the sort of systemic take-over of private industry that is literally unprecedented in American history. Voters don't want that. They just want to make sure their insurance will be there during a catastrophe, and that their premiums won't bankrupt them. They don't want anything that comes close to government imposed rationing. This isn't about health or cost-cutting. It's about freedom, something anyone with a high school education can understand, but which has gone over the heads of the smart guys running the reform.

There are plenty of market reforms that would be popular and may do some good. The sort of reforms proposed by the likes of John McKay would be easy to understand, easy to implement, would not require an overhaul of 17% of the economy, and we would not be subjected to the sight of non-doctors like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama telling us what sort of health care we can or can't access. But, these sort of reforms have been rendered reforma non grata by a political class that has no interest in proposals that would result in decentralization and free market decision making. We are at this impasse because the hands at the levers of power will not yield to the clearly expressed desires of the Great Unwashed