New York Magazine Run by Rahm Emmanuel?
New York Magazine does a summary analysis of all the players in the health care debate right now. It does a good job remaining nuanced and objective… until you get to Congressional Republicans.
Who: Republicans
What They Want: Whatever Grassley, Snowe, and Enzi settle on, the rest of their party is following a brutal strategy: Tag reform as budget-busting socialized medicine, kill it, and hang its carcass around Obama’s neck.
What They’ve Done: Relentlessly, and fairly successfully, attacked Obamacare as too expensive — while blocking money-saving reforms. Leaders have bragged that stopping Obama on health care will, as Senator Jim DeMint said, “break him.” As Howard Fineman put it: “Their whole strategy … is to stand on the sidelines with their arms folded while the Democrats try to work this thing out.”
What They’ll Do Next: Fire up YouTube and laugh while watching right-wing agitators lambaste Democratic congressmen at town-hall meetings.
What They’ll Get: Perhaps a seriously buckled president. Obama’s not only juggling dozens of political and policy calculations, he’s fighting the undertow of the calendar. The recession may be decelerating, but the economy is still trending downward, dragging his approval rating with it. There’s rising popular anxiety about deficits and debt. And while there’s broad support for the idea of reform and various particular Democratic proposals, the administration hasn’t yet connected its plan to increased security for the middle class.
Right-wingers risk a backlash. But win or lose, they’ve fired up the base for the 2009 and 2010 elections — and at this point, the Republicans don’t know how to appeal to anyone else, anyway.
When did the intelligencer become Rahm Emmanuel’s mouthpiece? Seriously, we’re going with that old “Party of No” trope? Nevermind that it’s the Blue Dogs who are obstructing Obama’s plans and that the GOP lacks the numbers to do any meaningful opposition. Nevermind that the GOP has proposed alternatives: Fraud detection, an electronic system, and malpractice reform to reduce costs; Un-bundling individual health care from employment by removing the employer tax exemption and transferring it to individual tax credits, thus inducing more private competition; Portable health savings accounts; Patient choice through expanded subsidies and state-established health care exchanges.
These are piece-meal solutions. The most pressing problem the latter two tackle is the 45 million who, for the most part, can’t afford health insurance. If that problem is solved, then we will have universal coverage by default, without the added burden of government rationing or the elimination of choice.
The Liberal delusion is to believe that health care reform has to be comprehensive. It doesn’t. Big bills are not necessarily good bills. They are more prone to rent-seeking, for one thing. And the more elaborate they are, the more likely one crack in the edifice will make the entire structure crumble, because the success of each individual proposal is now dependent on the success of its accompanying proposals. For example, the more mandates you impose on employers and the more regulations you place on health care providers, the more ways you provide for them to “game the system” in their favor, likely driving up costs beyond estimates.
Nevertheless, Republicans have seriously discredited their positions with their constant fearmongering about how Obama’s proposal is an evil plot concocted by Canadian Marxists to destroy American individualism.
Which serious conservative pundit has said that? For that matter, did any House or Senate Republican say those words? It is not unreasonable for conservatives to worry that Obamacare will turn the American system into a Canadian one, fraught with all its inefficiencies and high costs. Look, it’s true that Obama’s current plan does not by itself constitute single payer - but if the public option works squeezes out private insurers and the regulations are onerous enough, we would end up with a single payer system by default. That scares a lot of Americans - with 300 million people, that’s a lot of rationing and money - and rightly so.