The Ship of ObamaCare is Taking on Water
By Anita Finlay ("Ani") on July 24, 2009 at 4:01 PM in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Obama Administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Peggy Noonan penned an opinion piece in today’s WSJ, Common Sense May Sink ObamaCare. I consider the source very carefully since Ms. Noonan found so much to laud in Mr. Obama’s candidacy last year. Today, her tune is somewhat different. She states:
This is big, what’s happening. President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood, which itself is news: He rose from nothing to everything with the help of his fine-tuned antennae. Resistance to the Democratic health-care plans is in the air, showing up more now on YouTube than in the polls, but it will be in the polls soon enough. The president, in short, may be facing a real loss. This will be interesting in a number of ways and for a number of reasons, among them that we’ve never seen him publicly defeated before, because he hasn’t been. So we may be entering new territory, with new struggles shaped by new dynamics.
His news conference the other night was bad. He was filibustery and spinny and gave long and largely unfollowable answers that seemed aimed at limiting the number of questions asked and running out the clock. You don’t do that when you’re fully confident. Far more seriously, he didn’t seem to be telling the truth. We need to create a new national health-care program in order to cut down on government spending? Who would believe that? Would anybody?
I may not agree with Ms. Noonan on much but I believe her critique here is spot on. She feels this plan will be stopped by American common sense. She points out that Americans getting clobbered by the economy
“are not in a chance-taking mood. They’re not in a spending mood, not after the unprecedented spending of the past year, from the end of the Bush era through the first six months of Obama. Here the Congressional Budget Office report that a health care bill would not save money but would instead cost more than a trillion dollars in the next decade was decisive. People say bureaucrats never do anything. The bureaucrats of CBO might have killed health care.”
The final bill, with all its complexities, will probably be huge, a thousand pages or so. Americans don’t fear the devil’s in the details, they fear hell is. Do they want the same people running health care who gave us the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office and the invasion of Iraq?
Certainly no one can blame Americans for being cautious here, especially since so much spending has been rammed down our gullets so quickly and the results have been, shall we say, less than stellar. Further Ms. Noonan indicates that several intangibles will also throw a wrench into ObamaCare:
The human factor. As Ms. Noonan puts it there are “doctors throughout the country who give patients a break, who quietly underbill someone they know is in trouble, or don’t charge for their services. Also the emergency rooms that provide excellent service for the uninsured in medical crisis. People don’t talk about this much because they’re afraid if they do they’ll lose it…”
Fear of a mandated taxpayer funding of abortion. This is still a difficult issue for many. In her words, telling Christians “who believe abortion is evil that they not only have to accept its legality but now have to pay for it in a brand new plan, for which they’ll be more highly taxed. This is taking a knife to your own supporters.”
Lastly, the greater the government’s intrusion, the greater “educated people who are at the top of American life feel they have the right to make very public criticisms of . . . let’s call it the private, pleasurable but health-related choices of others. They shame smokers and the overweight. Drinking will be next. Mr. Obama’s own choice for surgeon general has come under criticism as too heavy.”
Under a national health-care plan we might be hearing that a lot. You don’t exercise, you smoke, you drink, you eat too much, and “the rest of us have to pay for it.”
Another fear is that this plan will involve health care rationing – particularly to the elderly. Same number of doctors and 50 million more insured? The math is troubling. More frightening is that no one understands how this plan will work. The White House cannot even explain it which tells us they don’t even know. While we certainly need a reform package, I do not have confidence in what is being offered. Back to the drawing board, ladies and gents. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
An article appears in the UK Telegraph today, wherein Gerald Warner makes the following comment:
Health care? Hillary must be laughing into her handbag: she was burning her fingers on this red-hot brick when Barack was still at law school. It is no longer Republicans who are the problem about getting this package through Congress: it is Democrats. Even the American left balks at a socialist scheme for health care that would have had Nye Bevan shouting “Hold on a moment!” Your brainchild, Barack – enjoy.
I’m not enjoying schadenfreude here, although who could blame anyone who did. I remember clearly how insulting the Obama campaign was to Hillary about her efforts on health care in 1993. They also degraded her health care proposals last year – which were better, simpler, cheaper and more sensible than what is now being offered. The point is, fixing health care is a “red-hot brick” and one cannot solve the problem on the force of one’s personality, nor can one solve it overnight.
Certain Democrats working to craft this plan have been heard to complain in the last few weeks that they are not getting enough guidance from the President on what he wants from them in this bill – aside from ‘get it done and make me look good.’ Well, that’s were actual leadership and knowledge come in. This is one area where a speech or a smile will not help.

















