It’s true: Barack Obama frequently speaks out against the
insurance mandates Mitt Romney has been taken to task for instituting, enraging portions of the
liberal left and causing some conservative observers to swoon. Yet
before allowing our hearts to melt into sentimental purple goop and
pinning an I’m an Obama Republican! button on our chests,
it might be wise to take at least a cursory glance at Obama’s
health-care proposals.
I pray it will not
boil the hope out of anyone to learn Obama can afford to oppose
individual mandates in the short-term mostly because he plans to
create a government health-care system so omnipresent in our lives
and so intrusive in the once-free-market that it will hardly matter
what kind of soaring rhetoric it is dressed up in.
Does anyone really believe, for example, there is no mandate
implicit in Obama’s stated goal of creating a national health-care
plan with universal eligibility and “subsidies” for those below an
unspecified income level to buy into it? Is he going to fund that
with gobs of small donations, too, or simply mandate taxpayers foot
the bill for the non-mandate, whether they purchase the insurance
or not? Who can miss the non-mandate mandate in Obama’s proposed
National Health Insurance Exchange, a new bureaucracy designed to
“help individuals who wish to purchase a private insurance
plan”?
Here’s the little illiberal blurb on this bit of state coercion
and regulation:
The Exchange will act as a watchdog group and help
reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards
for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make
individual coverage more affordable and accessible. Insurers would
have to issue every applicant a policy, and charge fair and stable
premiums that will not depend upon health status. The Exchange will
require that all the plans offered are at least as generous as the
new public plan and have the same standards for quality and
efficiency.
So much for Saint Barrack of the Church of Individual
Responsibility. He begins with the assumption that the federal
government is the uncontestable expert on efficiency, fairness and
generosity — not exactly a left-libertarian position, even in the
context of the Edwards and Clinton mandates — and works his way
forward from there, making clear he will brook no dissent from
private companies. It is creating the crisis that will lead to de
facto single-payer: Eventually the IRS will be charging everyone so
much for national health insurance we’d all be crazy not to plug
our little parasite cords into the leviathan.
What’s more, for all the trouble it has caused him in the
liberal blogosphere, Obama may only be triangulating on the
health-care issue with an eye toward gaining the trust of
independent voters and disaffected Republicans next November.
David Cutler, a Harvard economics professor and Obama’s senior
health-care adviser, has been quite candid about the very real
possibility of Obama forcing everyone to buy health insurance if
they fail to embrace his national health-care system. “If there are
free riders, Obama is open to mandates,” Cutler told the weblog The Sentinel Effect,
adding, “He hasn’t ruled anything out. It’s a matter of priorities.
The fact is the policy differences on the mandate issue aren’t that
large at all. Sen. Obama believes they’re an option down the road,
if other approaches don’t work.”
That Obama is likely to have a post-election conversion is
precisely what incisive universal health-care advocates such as
Ezra Klein seem to fear most.
“The absence of a mandate in his plan was a minor
disappointment,” Klein writes. “But his decision to launch an assault
on the very idea of the individual mandate was a major problem.
It’s overwhelmingly likely that the next incarnation of universal
health care will be based around an individual mandate. And when
that happens, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the airwaves will be
blanketed with Barack Obama’s arguments against it, even as Obama
supports the eventual plan from his seat in the Senate or place in
the White House (and he will — his plan has a mandate for
children, and he’s repeatedly professed openness to a mandate for
adults).”
None of this is new. Often as not for Obama, the politics of hope has
been about hoping no one bothers to dig very deep into the
absurdly-general-yet-poetic flowery proclamations his entire
campaign is based upon. When, for example, Tim Russert queried
Obama recently about his 2004 equivocations on the Iraq War —
specifically, responding, “What would I have done? I don’t know”
when asked about the force resolution and, further, claiming,
“There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and
George Bush’s position at this stage” — Obama made clear he did
not consider himself bound by statements made for political
expediency.
“Now, Tim, that first quote was made in an interview with a guy
named Tim Russert on Meet the Press during the convention
when we had a nominee for the presidency and a vice president, both
of whom had voted for the war,” Obama lectured. “And so it, it
probably was the wrong time for me to be making a strong case
against our party’s nominees’ decisions when it came to Iraq.”
Of course! Why be honest and up-front when there’s an election
to be won!
Likewise, now, as Obama parades around in the utterly undeserved mantle of Post-Partisan
Independent Uniter, looking for a way to differentiate himself from
his opponents, it is clearly the “wrong time” for him to be pushing
individual mandates. But the back-story of how he will come to be
forced to embrace mandates is already being prepared. He’ll attack
the “free riders” and obstinate employers and National Health
Insurance Exchange will look high and low without ever finding a
private insurance company that is acting fair. And what will those
who praised Obama for what is no doubt to be just one scene in this
endless dog and pony show get for their trouble?
Not much, likely, save a terrible insurance policy, a lifetime’s
worth of frustrating calls to unresponsive federal bureaucrats, and
a sob story nobody wants to hear about how the cold water of
President Obama’s reality paradoxically boiled that hope out of
them.
American Spectator Contributing Editor Shawn Macomber is writing a book on the Global Class
War.
