By
LEROY GOLDMAN
The Shadow Knows
The Shadow Knows
Published: Sunday, November 10, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.
Today's column will be my last. The Shadow and I want to thank all of you who have been kind enough to send along words of encouragement and constructive criticism over the past two years.
President Obama, the reluctant warrior
The effort to enact health care
reform in the United States is a century old. It began with the
Progressive Party platform of Theodore Roosevelt's unsuccessful quest
for the presidency in 1912.
President Franklin Roosevelt
considered adding comprehensive health insurance to his proposal for
Social Security in 1935 but dropped it for fear that the adamant
opposition of the American Medical Association might doom Social
Security.
President Harry Truman tried and
failed to achieve passage of the Murray-Wagner-Dingell health
insurance bill after World War II.
President Lyndon Johnson made
health insurance a top priority, and with the advantage of huge
Democratic majorities in Congress he successfully passed Medicare and
Medicaid.
In the early 1970s, Sen. Edward
Kennedy attempted to build a bipartisan bridge between his national
health insurance proposal and the one submitted by President Richard
Nixon. But Kennedy's allies in organized labor would not countenance
any bargain with Nixon, and Nixon would not agree to financing such a
measure through payroll taxes. Watergate sealed the failure.
Although President Jimmy Carter
proposed his own health insurance scheme, it was not embraced by the
leading Democratic proponents of comprehensive reform in Congress. It
went nowhere.
President Bill Clinton made health
insurance reform a top priority, and he appointed first lady Hillary
Clinton to lead the effort. The complexity of the bill she presented
to a Congress controlled by Democrats doomed it.
Comes now Barack Obama, the man who
made the enactment of health care reform the centerpiece of his 2008
campaign and his presidency.
One would think that after such a
protracted and bitter struggle over the past century, the enactment
of health care reform in 2010 would be cause for a genuine national
sigh of relief and celebration. But whether you love Obamacare or
hate it, you can't deny the fact that its passage and implementation
have left the nation deeply and bitterly divided.
In 2007, Obama was on the verge of
not accepting an invitation to speak at a health conference sponsored
by Families USA, a progressive group. But, as Carrie Brown and Glenn
Thrush reported on Politico.com about six weeks ago, “two aides,
Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him
appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the
moment. Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health
care by the end of his first term?”
One of them said, “We needed
something to say. I can't tell you how little thought was given to
that thought other than it sounded good.”
Thus, Obama came to embrace the
necessity for health care reform mainly by accident. It was a way to
enable him to begin to compete with his rival for the nomination,
Hillary Clinton, on an issue where she had an established, though
tarnished, track record.
Furthermore, at that time there
appeared to be no consequential downside to the fact that Obama was a
novice on heath care. Not only did Hillary Clinton expect to win the
nomination, so too did many in the Obama campaign. But, of course, it
didn't work out that way!
Once inaugurated, President Obama
chose to stand and deliver on health care over the objections of
senior advisers. But Obama turned the job of writing the bill over to
the Democrats on the Hill — an unforced error. He did not insist
that the bill contain provisions, such as tort reform, that would
have brought at least a modicum of Republicans on board, making the
effort bipartisan — an unforced error.
He allowed the bill to become so
grotesquely complex that he has never been able to explain it to the
American people — an unforced error. He steadfastly continues to
characterize the law as health care reform when in fact many of its
central components, including the individual mandate and the
exchanges, are the handiwork of the health insurance industry — an
unforced error.
He presumed that the federal
government was capable of implementing a law that was designed to
make profound changes in the operation of a $2.5 trillion industry
that makes up what soon will be 20 percent of the nation's gross
domestic product — an unforced error. And, after having more than
three years to design the Obamacare website, HHS Secretary Sebelius
and her bureaucrats gave birth to what she now describes as a debacle
— an unforced error.
Those unforced errors are more than
enough to ruin a good idea. But there is more, and the more is more
troubling.
When presidents lie and the
American people tumble to it, look out! At least 24 times, President
Obama told the nation, “If you like your health care plan, you'll
be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it
away. No matter what.”
Tell that to the hundreds of
thousands of Americans who are now receiving cancellation letters.
Their individual policies are being canceled so that the Obama
administration can force younger, healthier Americans into Obamacare
to prevent the program from imploding due to the influx of older,
sicker persons.
Assuming that the president didn't
know and intend that is preposterous.
The president and his sycophants
are now trapped by their hubris, mendacity and incompetence. Obama
has risked his legacy and more importantly the nation's well-being on
a deeply flawed idea made immeasurably worse by its bungled
implementation. It's what happens when you send a neophyte to do a
man's job.
