Obama’s promise on insurance wasn’t just injudicious, it was completely impossible. It wasn’t an incidental falsehood but ran counter to the central premise of his own health care law. People losing their current insurance isn’t an unintended consequence of the law; it is an intended consequence without which much of the law doesn’t work. Democrats not only tied themselves to the law, they repeated Obama’s false promise themselves, and evidently don’t appreciate it one bit. Maybe they genuinely didn’t know better. Our representatives in Congress can’t be expected to read or understand legislation they support to transform a major sector of the American economy. These are busy and important people. But at the very least, the president’s policy staff could have let them in on the joke. Some of them now support legislation, one way or another, to grandfather canceled insurance policies so people can really keep them if they like them. The bills are opposed by the White House, despite the president’s prior promise, despite his semi-apology for misleading people, despite his stated desire to fix the problem. The White House’s posture, in other words, is that the president is sorry that he lied and all, and he really wants people to keep their coverage — but it just can’t be done. And, on its own terms, it is right. It is possible to let people keep their current insurance, but only by unraveling a key element of Obamacare. To make the law work, people in the individual insurance market content with their current coverage have to be forced out of their plans and onto the exchanges. That’s the only way to ensure the exchanges aren’t overwhelmed by older and less healthy consumers. The president couldn’t be honest about this at the time of the law’s passage and still can’t be honest about it. The White House acts as though it is doing the people whose insurance is getting canceled a favor by protecting them from “substandard” policies, rather than admitting that it is asking them to make a sacrifice. The great engine of the welfare state is the hidden cost. Usually, the costs of a new program or regulation are too diffuse or distant to matter much politically in comparison to the promise of a direct benefit. This time, the costs aren’t hidden. They are immediate and concrete in the canceled policies and the higher premiums, and they are making the politics of Obamacare toxic.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 20:54:01 +0000
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