On yesterday's Rush Limbaugh Show, a big topic was the failure of the GOP's "skinny" Obamacare repeal in the Senate, thanks to John McCain's thumbs-down in the wee small hours. This bill was, as Congressman Louie Gohmert pointed out, the most minimalist "rollback" of Obamacare that you could devise, and yet even that was too much for McCain, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. And I remarked in the course of the show that all too predictable GOP faintheartedness had been baked into the Democrats' calculations from Day One, all those years ago. Here's what I wrote in my syndicated column of March 5th 2010 - over seven years ago:
[Right-of-center parties] fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place. Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter?
Yeah, right. When the Democrats hammered Obamacare down the gullet of the American people on a partisan vote and in the teeth of massive negative poll, they foresaw all too clearly the behavior of Mitch McConnell's caucus all these years later. Here's the rest of that column:
So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59 (this was a popular topic among political cartoonists), and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of "reconciliation." And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance "reconciliation," Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.
A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense."
Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.
Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:
"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.
This "reform" is not about health care, and certainly not about "controlling costs." As with Medicare, it "controls" costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he'll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store. Yet Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:
"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."
Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. George Washington had wooden teeth, but, presumably, these days the Sierra Club would object to the clear-cutting. Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?
Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
~from Steyn's syndicated column, March 5th 2010
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11 Member Comments
Leave Obamacare in place, but obviate it by other means. Place a simple paragraph in some innocuous piece of legislation that says "Insurance companies may sell any medical insurance policies to anybody who will buy them." William Wilberforce brought an end to the slave trade in the British Empire by that means after decades of failing to defeat it through head-on combat. Somebody explain to me why that wouldn't work.
My thoughts exactly. I don't understand why they won't do it. Perhaps they don't want O'care to implode, liars yhat they are; but it will anyway.
I wonder if Trump' strategy should be to tell McConnell (and all the committee chairman) that he is going to actively run against the 8 Republican senators up for reelection next year. He'll back primary opponents first, and if that doesn't work he'll openly endorse whichever democrat is running, under this twitter: I'd rather have an honest American-hating dem who could care less about the middle class then the subversive poseur Republicans we have now.
Thank you for reprinting this column, as this past week, I'd been reminding people that you'd opined that the Republicans would never have the guts to gut this beached whale.
Lisa Murkowski doesn't care about her Alaska constituents. She knows she has the reliable vote of the Alaska natives since they are under the Alaska Native Healthcare Act. ObamaCare means nothing to them, or to her. I truly wish we could get rid of her, but I don't think it will happen. Just consider her a Democrat idiot.
With luck, Mark's suggestion that there be an adequate if somewhat institutional tax-paid welfare health system, where all services within reason are available but the wait is longer and the buildings older; and a competitive private system where you can buy an insurance policy that fits your life and pony up for some of the frills, will finally occur to Trump. Lord knows the GOP capos would faint but it would give him a true "single-payer system that would cover the mythic uncovered millions" to throw in the Dems face come 2020. He could get them to vote for it! Screw Ryan & McConnell. Then the rest of us, who work or are simply willing to buy into a better system, can shop a free market in coverage, treatment, medications, therapies, etc. He really should make DC's head collectively explode by appointing Ann Coulter as head of his Healthcare Task Force. She'd be done before the word even got out. That's how simple this whole Charlie Foxtrot really is to solve.
Back in the 70's when I was a pre-med student in NYC, my History professor told a group of us at a get together at his apartment one night that the tide will turn in the US where we will become more communistic and the Soviet Union would become more democratic. It will be a long conversion process. I thought he was nuts. I imagine he would be about 98 years old today, don't think he's around but through the years I reflect on that evening and his prophetic words. The other elective courses I took included a teacher who referred to the "Founding Father"s as the "fumbling fathers" in her class material handouts and that we should consider ourselves as "United Stations", people of the world rather American Citizens. Well we are here. Everything my Dad spoke of in his time in Siberia and how he got there at the age of 16 for treason is happening and has been happening for about 50 years now. I missed opportunities because of affirmative action and I missed the "white privilege" train, it left the station before I got there. I worked laying flat roofs in NYC to pay for college and never paid attention to the freebies others were getting while "I earned too much" to qualify for grant money to go to school. In the little free time I had I memorized the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, Literature became my passion. English being my third language I learned the literature of my parents native tongues Never receiving any freebies to date, I'm wondering what life will be like for our 3 grown children, who see the fake news as propaganda rather than being fake. All three being professionals have explained to me that they have figured the government years ago, always sticking to a small click of like minded pears to survive the twisted school system and now in their PC world they still don't say much at work. As I approach retirement, always defending our constitution, always respecting others point of view, never actually feeling like I was accepted into American society. I was always respectful of America, for everything I was able to achieve. Taking advantage of America without giving back would make me feel like a thief. We raised our kids to think the same way. To this day I feel like a slave to the tax man but I feel good when I can make the payment on time year after year. Mark's comments and analysis as usual are spot on, call it what you will the ever growing federal employees involved with Obamacare or the deep state will continue to grow some will start speaking English, some may even get a high school diploma but one thing is for sure the conservative will be a relic. Obamacare was not supposed to change quality of health care, it was supposed to make health care affordable. Consider it fake, I think my kids are right it's propaganda-its a lie with a mission. They lied to get the bill passed as a tax (thank you Supreme Court for interpreting the flexibility of the Constitution), they lied to say health care quality will not change (you can keep your doctor, etc). It was all Stalin's Beria quality of propaganda. Being a relic, I'm thinking of spending part of my retirement being a goat herder near the Steppes of Ukraine, and part of Poland known as Bieszczady. There's a special cheese made in that part of the world, it may be just what I need to stay healthy.
So, if all this is true - and there's little doubt that it is - then the American republic is already DOA, the Republican Party a pathetic joke, and the constitution "just a piece of [inconvenient] parchment" to which occasional lip service is paid, but little more. America is now ruled by the unregulated regulatory-administrative state and all the politicians posing as VIPI's are really little more than a sad sideshow. The Democrat Progressives created this monster and all they can contribute is more food (Obamacare), like The Little Shop of Horrors. Fortunately for them, that's what they want, because they have no more control over it than the ridiculous Republicans. Is it an accident of fate or a cruel irony that the latter are presided over by Mitch McConnell, the quintessential nebbish, and Paul Ryan whose greatest battle is with his five o'clock shadow? Thus, presumably, we should all heed the advice given to rape victims; if the result is inevitable, why not just lie back and enjoy it? What other option do we have or, as Hillary once so infamously put it, what difference, at this point, does it make?
I am sad to say that I agree with Mark's analysis. What a sad - but not unexpected - commentary it would be on "America" and "Constitutionalism" and "Liberty" and "Freedom" if the First [and Second, Third, Fourth, (and more?) Iranian (plus NoKo)] Nukes that land on Washington, DC proved to be the Agents that finally restored Constitutional America throughout about 45 of the 50 "states"...
McCain has a large constituency of pre Obamacare "gimmee-gimmees" who need constant tender attention. Not to mention making sure everyone in the White House clearly understands how Washington works.
My dearest Mark! I think I understand your drive to fight the social rot and unrelenting push by the left toward the abyss and horror where the once great societies fall. If you are carried by the relentless current toward the waterfall, you have two options - you can stop resisting and be gone for certain, or you can fight like hell and swim to safety. In not so many words - "If I go down, I go down swinging". Many a time the hopeless battles were won by fighters who wouldn't give up. That is my motto as well and it worked out so far. Some say "you're lucky". Maybe, but "Luck comes to those who are ready to fight"