The politics of health care

In trying to explain why Romney has been left standing at the curb with "RomneyCare," The Corner's Stephen Spreuiell seems to have forgotten to put the appropriate intellectual gloss over the fact that Republicans uniformly oppose a health care reform bill that, ostensibly, they would have supported in 1994.

When the Clinton task force unveiled its plan a few months later, it had combined a little from column A and a little from column B into a hybrid plan that the public ultimately rejected. But at the time, that outcome was far from certain. In a December 13, 1993 piece titled "Contrasting Conservative Plans" (columns C and D above), John Hood wrote that one advantage of the Heritage plan over the Gramm plan was its political feasibility as an alternative to Clintoncare: "By failing to guarantee universal coverage and by letting insurers charge higher prices in the initial underwriting stage to people with pre-existing illnesses or disorders, Heritage defenders say, the Gramm plan fails the first test of reform: Will it pass a nervous Congress and satisfy the demands of the American people?"

What happened in the intervening period is that the political center of gravity shifted to the right on this issue. Republicans looked to the town halls, the tea parties, and the polling on Obamacare and concluded that they could safely oppose the entire concept of compulsory insurance coverage and offer a different direction on health care — one more closely aligned with column D above and centered on attacking the cost problem first. Compulsory insurance would not be necessary, after all, if insurance were something most people could afford to buy on their own.

Most Republicans and conservatives who once supported the individual mandate moved to the right along with the rest of the public. As Sen. Orrin Hatch explained in a post on Critical Condition:

To be clear, I supported [the individual mandate as an] alternative to President Clinton's massive federal takeover of the American health-care system, because my number-one priority was the defeat of yet another big-government assault on health care that the people of Utah overwhelmingly opposed. It's that simple.

In the intervening years, I went back and carefully examined, in close consultation with constitutional experts, the legal problems with many of the bills being supported at the time. This needed to be done, because of the hasty nature of the debate which was thrust upon us in 1994. It is simply a fact that Congress has never imposed this kind of mandate before. We concluded, as would any intelligent scholar of the Constitution, that this federal mandate requiring Americans to either purchase health insurance or face a punitive tax exceeds the authority the Constitution has given to Congress.

The Heritage Foundation has adopted this same position, as Robert Moffit explained in an op-ed for The Washington Post yesterday: "Our research . . . has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective," Moffit wrote. "Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it."

Wait, did they look to the polls or consult with (unnamed) constitutional "experts?" And during the last long summer of tea parties and town halls, how come Republicans didn't offer an alternative plan focusing on health care costs and lowering the price of insurance? I mean, if their ideas were so poll tested, popular, "operationally effective and legally...un-defective" than surely they would have scored tremendous points with a skeptical public by showing they really do have "ideas" about "heath care" and "reform."

Instead, what they really want to do now, should they regain control of Congress, is to "repeal" the "bad stuff," i.e., the cost control elements of the bill (such as the individual mandate) and keep the "good stuff,"such as the ban on rescissions and refusing coverage based on pre-existing conditions. And, oh yeah, billions of dollars to the states. You know, the stuff that will drive up the cost of health insurance.

As with the Plan D drug benefit, they're fine with showering voters with benefits (just don't mention "donut holes"), but paying for them...shit, that's for suckers.

The Concern Troll is right

Steve Benen also offers up some good advice for Dems: listen to Bill Kristol.

Palin, Bush, and the GOP establishment

Bill Kristol asks a philosophical question.

In any case, this is the same GOP establishment that rallied behind first-term governor George W. Bush in 1997-98 and then propelled him to the nomination in 1999-2000. Had Bush accomplished more than Palin at that point?

Yes, yes it is. And look where that got us.

Gingrich/Cheney 2012

It is with some disappointment that I am reminded how spectacularly wrong Bill "the Bloody" Kristol has been about everything he's written on over the past several years.

I read The Post today, oh boy

The Right Reverand George Will doesn't care for our hedonistic priorities.

Put down that cheeseburger and listen up: If food has become what sex was a generation ago -- the intimidatingly intelligent Mary Eberstadt says it has -- then a cheeseburger is akin to adultery, or worse. As eating has become highly charged with moral judgments, sex has become notably less so, and Eberstadt, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, thinks these trends involving two primal appetites are related.

In a Policy Review essay, "Is Food the New Sex?" -- it has a section titled "Broccoli, pornography, and Kant" -- she notes that for the first time ever, most people in advanced nations "are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want." One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pursued with an ardor heedless of consequences, or that both would be subjected to analogous codes constraining consumption. The opposite has happened -- mindful eating and mindless sex.

Be glad you're not a female relative of Mr. Will. And if today's sex is so "mindless," why do I think about it all of the time? Far more, I must say, then my cholesteral count.

Of course, for George, his concern is all about the ladies.

Imagine, says Eberstadt, a 30-year-old Betty in 1958, and her 30-year-old granddaughter Jennifer today. Betty's kitchen is replete with things -- red meat, dairy products, refined sugars, etc. -- that nutritionists now instruct us to minimize. She serves meat from her freezer, accompanied by this and that from jars. If she serves anything "fresh," it would be a potato. If she thinks about food, she thinks only about what she enjoys, not what she, and everyone else, ought to eat.

Jennifer pays close attention to food, about which she has strong opinions. She eats neither red meat nor endangered fish, buys "organic" meat and produce, fresh fruits and vegetables, and has only ice in her freezer. These choices are, for her, matters of right and wrong. Regarding food, writes Eberstadt, Jennifer exemplifies Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative: She acts according to rules she thinks are universally valid and should be universally embraced.

Betty would be baffled by draping moral abstractions over food, a mere matter of personal taste. Regarding sex, however, she had her Categorical Imperative -- the 1950s' encompassing sexual ethic that proscribed almost all sex outside of marriage. Jennifer is a Whole Foods Woman, an apostle of thoroughly thought-out eating. She bristles with judgments -- moral as well as nutritional -- about eating, but she is essentially laissez-faire about sex.

Ok, George, I get it, vegans and vaginas are both annoying. But, really, aren't the examples above the two sides of George Will's fantasy -- the 50s as a time of technicolor, bosom heaving but chaste romance and marriage fidelity, and our current era as one of unbridled female lust? But then again, he finds Ms. Eberstadt "intimdatingly intelligent." You should see her in stillettos, George.

And while I understand that the grandaddy of Wingnut Welfare sits on the campus of Stamford, since when do we refer to it as "Stamford University's Hoover Institute?"

Back to the Post's fair and balance editorial pages this morning. Bill Kristol urges Republicans to forswear the sirens of sane political, environmental, and public health discourse, and instead party like it's 1993.

For Obama's aim is not merely to "revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity." Obama outlined much of this new foundation in the most unabashedly liberal and big-government speech a president has delivered to Congress since Lyndon Baines Johnson. Obama intends to use his big three issues -- energy, health care and education -- to transform the role of the federal government as fundamentally as did the New Deal and the Great Society.

Conservatives and Republicans will disapprove of this effort. They will oppose it. Can they do so effectively?

Perhaps -- if they can find reasons to obstruct and delay. They should do their best not to permit Obama to rush his agenda through this year. They can't allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965. Slow down the policy train. Insist on a real and lengthy debate. Conservatives can't win politically right now. But they can raise doubts, they can point out other issues that we can't ignore (especially in national security and foreign policy), they can pick other fights -- and they can try in any way possible to break Obama's momentum. Only if this happens will conservatives be able to get a hearing for their (compelling, in my view) arguments against big-government, liberal-nanny-state social engineering -- and for their preferred alternatives.

Right now, Obama is in the driver's seat -- a newly elected and popular president with comfortable Democratic congressional majorities and an adulatory mainstream news media. Still, Republicans do have advantages over their forebears in 1965 and 1933. There are more Republicans in Congress today, so they should be able to resist more effectively. There is much more of a record of liberal failures to look back on now than when the New Deal and the Great Society were being rushed through. Conservatism is more sophisticated than it was back then. So there is no reason to despair.

Ah yes, "conservatism is more sophisticated then it was back then." But you knew that.

"Obstruct and delay," my friends. Make your ("compelling" in his view) arguments heard, even though you haven't formulated any other than taxes, 9-11, volacano monitors. Given Col. Kristol's track record, I'm guessing conservatives have many reasons to despair.

2008 in pitchers

It's been a helluva year, part 1.

Exceptional, or just "special?"

Shorter William "the bloody" Kristol: "Enraged, anti-GOP voters will greet John McCain with sweets and flowers."

Greenwald helpfully reminds us why Kristol is on the OpEd page of the paper of record:

Rosenthal actually claimed when he hired Kristol that he did so to achieve "balance" and to create diversity on the Op-Ed page. Indeed. Last Monday, Kristol's column compared Americans who don't want to fight for Israel to Neville Chamberlain appeasers. Then, on Wednesday, Tom Friedman declared a "cold war" whereby Israel and the U.S. fight together (along with Sunni Arab dictators) against Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. Then, on Friday, David Brooks declared Obama suspect when it comes to hating Hezbollah enough, writing that Obama's statements bear "the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement" and that "if Obama believes all this, he's not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He's off in Noam Chomskyland." Obama then had to call Brooks, demonstrate his commitment to hating Hezbollah, and was cleared by Brooks (for now) of the charge of insufficient devotion to fighting Israel's enemies.