Harry Reid scored a victory Saturday night. And part of the line of argument from those urging that senators vote against the motion to proceed Saturday night was: The bill is not likely to get better from here on in. So is it over? Abortion, high costs — is it all now a given? National Review Online asked a group of experts: What is a constructive, realistic conservative attitude toward Demcare in the Senate this Thanksgiving?
JEFFREY H. ANDERSON
The moment of truth is now here for Democratic efforts to overhaul our health-care system and inject the federal government into the historically private relationship between patient and doctor.
Poll after poll has shown the American people don’t want this legislation. President Obama’s popularity has plummeted as he’s pushed it. Americans think premiums, taxes, and deficits would rise, Medicare would be weakened, and the quality of care would decline. And they’d be right. Americans think the government-run “public option” could eventually funnel them into government-run care, and it likely would. Whatever happens, the government would largely now be running the show, with taxpayers, Medicare beneficiaries, and future generations footing the bill.
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The worst thing Republicans can do is help mask the costs of this venture by parroting the Democrats’ deliberately misleading numbers. The Congressional Budget Office shows that only 1 percent of the costs from the Democrats’ “first 10 years” would hit before the fifth year. In the bill’s
real first 10 years — from 2014 to 2023 — the CBO projects it would cost $1.8 trillion, raise taxes by $892 billion, siphon $802 billion out of Medicare to spend elsewhere, and either cut doctors’ pay by $431 billion or else raise deficits by $286 billion. And the CBO projects that costs, taxes, Medicare cuts, and doctors’ pay/national deficits would get much worse from there.
James Madison wrote in the
Federalist Papers that “the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers.” Madison meant either before or after an intervening election or two. The Democrats are determined to show that Madison’s statement is as wrong as they regard his belief in limited government to be.
I suspect Madison will be proven right on both counts.
—Jeffrey H. Anderson is a senior fellow in health-care studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
JAMES CAPRETTA
The vote on Saturday in the U.S. Senate to end debate and proceed to consideration of Sen. Harry Reid’s health-care bill hasn’t changed the basic political dynamic that has been in place for some months now. The Obama White House and its allies in Congress are determined to pass a full governmental takeover of American health care, and they won’t be deterred unless and until it’s clear they don’t have the votes. So there is little choice for conservatives but to continue an all-out effort to defeat the legislation when the debate in the Senate begins in earnest after Thanksgiving.
Under normal circumstances, that would be easy. The Reid bill, as others have noted, is about as unpopular as can be imagined. It was written by liberals to appeal to liberals. It imposes a massive tax hike on the American middle class to finance the largest expansion of government in a generation — at a time when many Americans are already alarmed by the debt burden that the Obama administration is piling up for the next generation of taxpayers. It cuts deeply into Medicare and will force millions of seniors out of their Medicare Advantage plans. And, most importantly, it would lead to clumsy governmental cost-control efforts that would erode the quality of American medicine and lead to queues and other access restrictions.
