Health-care reform: Where Obama went wrong

“What happened to Obamacare?” said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. The “master rhetorician’’ in the White House thought he could sell Americans anything, including a promise of better health care for less cost—but then “rhetoric met reality.” As a result, President Obama’s grand plan to remake the entire health-care system has now bogged down in Congress, and his August deadline for passage is dead. From the beginning, Obama’s primary goal was to provide health-care coverage for the uninsured, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. But no one except liberals is clamoring for that, so he’s tried disguising “his grand, misbegotten scheme” with a blizzard of lies. Reform, he promised, would be “revenue neutral” and not add to the deficit. No one would lose his private coverage. But the Congressional Budget Office has found that plans working their way through the Democratic Congress would cost at least $1 trillion over the next decade. A new Lewin Group study found that if a government-run health-care program is created as an “option,” as Obama wants, many employers would opt out of private insurance plans and 80 million Americans would lose their current coverage. No wonder Obama keeps lying, and “telling people what they want to hear.”

For a guy who’s usually sensitive to “the nation’s mood,” Obama sure has been tone-deaf, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. Americans have already committed more than $1 trillion to bail out banks and auto companies and stimulate the economy, and this is no time to ask them to commit another $1 trillion to health-care “reform.” More than 80 percent of those with coverage say they’re satisfied with it. Try as he might, Obama can’t answer the most basic question about “reform,” said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. And that’s, “What’s in it for me?” Polls show that 60 percent of Americans think the Democrats’ various health-care proposals will help someone other than themselves.

They’re wrong, said Newsday in an editorial. In our current system, you lose your health insurance if you lose your job, and every day, 14,000 Americans join the 47 million with no health coverage. That’s a scandal. Furthermore, health-care costs are now projected to double over the next decade, and employers will respond by dropping coverage, or depressing wages, or laying off people. Medicare and Medicaid costs, meanwhile, will soar, producing ever-larger deficits and pressure for tax increases. Credit Obama for facing this crisis, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. His critics, on the other hand, are “shameless.’’ Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans are objecting to any proposal that would increase costs. But they also object to any proposal that would limit “freedom of choice,” identify where the waste is, or provide a more cost-efficient, government-run alternative. What “complete hypocrites.”

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The country has two choices here, said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post. We can work our way through the inevitable “cacophony” of complaints and concerns, and “begin the multi­year task of fixing the health system”—or we can once again say it’s too hard and do nothing. As “excruciatingly difficult” as true reform may be, 70 percent of Americans think the system needs an overhaul. Democrats know they have to do something, or watch Obama suffer a humiliating defeat. So mark this down: “Despite all the dire words being spoken now, some version of health-care reform will pass.”