Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Clinton Cares

The headline threw me: "Clinton says he was wrong on healthcare bill's popularity." I mean, obviously he was wrong--trying to stiffen the spines of fearful Democrats, he said public approval would start increasing "the minute" the bill was passed.  I was just surprised to hear he was admitting it.

Turns out he's not really admitting he was flat-out wrong so much as trying to explain away what he said:

First of all, the benefits of the bill are spread out of [sic] three or four years. It takes a long time to implement. And secondly, there has been an enormous and highly effective attack on it.

The first excuse is hard to buy, since everyone understood the goodies in the bill don't come till later (an accounting trick to make the whole thing seem cheaper). The second excuse begs the question.  Before the bill passed, there had been an enormous and highly effective attack on it--that was why Dems were afraid to vote for it.  To say it'll be popular after it passes is to say that the enormous and highly effective attack on it will no longer be effective once it's a done deal.

Not satisfied, Clinton continues:

I think [Obama] was shocked at the intensity of the Republican opposition. But they learned from my first two years that, if you just say no, even though people hate it, you get rewarded for it because it discourages the Democrats and it inflames your base. So they're doing just what they did in '93 and '94. And so far it appears that they're being rewarded for it.

So people hate it when you try to stop an unpopular bill.  They hate it so much they reward you.

There's a belief on the left--some would say a fantasy--that it was the failure to pass HillaryCare that hurt the Dems in 1994.  Doesn't it seem more likely that trying to shove a massive and massively unpopular bill down the people's throats is more likely to do damage?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Lawrence King said...

The most sinister part of the saga is Kathleen Sebelius sending threatening letters to insurance companies, demanding that they join the administration in its disinformation campaign ("the bill won't raise insurance costs").

I think there are only two stable systems: (1) Private insurance where companies set their rates based on the market. (2) A one-payer system where every American pays a tax (preferably a separate line-item like social security tax) and the government pays the doctors, and there are no private insurance companies.

Obamacare ended up being a compromise, but the result is a frankenstein's monster: the insurance companies are more important than ever, but their rates are micromanaged by the government, and they are also the whipping boys that the Democrats will blame for all problems in the law. If this law remains in force, sooner or later the insurance companies will be bankrupted -- which some on the Left would welcome, but which would cause Obamacare itself to collapse.

8:22 AM, September 21, 2010  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's the plan. Any way the government can get its foot in the door ultimately leads to complete government control, as they regulate everyone to death.

9:29 AM, September 21, 2010  

Post a Comment

<< Home

web page hit counter