Some have said that health care reform is Obama’s Waterloo, or will be soon.
The analogy is far from perfect; for example, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was followed by his abdication, surrender, and exile, and it’s hard to believe this will happen to Obama even if the bill fails. But if “Waterloo” is shorthand for a big and important loss, than it would be an apt description for the situation the administration and its allies would face if this bill (or something like it) goes down to defeat.
This is because Obama has already placed so very much emphasis on it. Even though most Americans feel no special sense of urgency about it, this administration has chosen the issue as the linchpin of hope and change, and has talked and acted as though legislation must pass now or something terrible will happen.
But that “something terrible” might just be that the public will catch on to the manifold problems inherent in the proposal before it can be passed. In fact, that is exactly what may have already happened, although it’s still possible that the Democrats will twist enough Blue Dog arms (or would it be legs?) to ram something through anyway, in order to avoid the embarrassment and face loss that would flow from a failure to pass any health care reform bill during the next Congressional session.
As Q and O writes, the Democrats have a dilemma on their hands:
They believe, now that they’ve brought it up and the president has made it one of his signature issues, that unless they pass it (or something they can call “health care reform”) they’ll have set him up for failure. However, they are also coming to realize that passing something now despite a majority of Americans saying slow down and start over could be hazardous to their political health ”“ and majorities.
Whether it leads to Waterloo or ultimate victory, this particular Democrat battle is one of their own making. Napoleon was faced with a coalition army massing against him, and so he had to fight; although he chose to attack sooner rather than later, there was no avoiding the confrontation. But the Democrats have taken this task upon themselves without any outside prompting or pressure other than the fact that it was a vital part of Obama’s campaign rhetoric.
They should have been wary if they had studied history (although not Napoleonic history), because health care reform has been a Waterloo of sorts before. Just remember Bill and Hillary. Like Obama, Bill Clinton had made campaign promises about health care reform, and Congress was similarly heavily Democratic for his first term (although not quite as enormously so as at present).
It seemed that passage should have been easy, but it wasn’t. As Hillary later said [emphasis mine]:
I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done.
Well, Hillary may have learned those lessons. But Obama, Pelosi, and other leading Democrats appear to have playing hooky that day in history class.
They also may have thought that the fact that they had slightly larger Democratic majorities in Congress than the Clintons enjoyed would make their efforts more likely to succeed. But the Clinton effort was a model of transparency and bipartisanship compared to Obamacare; at least they had a coherent bill to defend, and they took a bit of time to try to explain and then sell it to Congress and the American people.
But health care reform wasn’t a problem just for the Clintons. For example, although it couldn’t really be called a Waterloo because George Bush managed to fulfill a campaign promise and get a Medicare prescription bill passed, he was criticized roundly for it by both sides—Democrats because it didn’t go far enough and was thought to unduly reward pharmaceutical companies, and Republicans because it was not fiscally responsible.
Let’s listen once again to Hillary on health care reform. Speaking in 2007, she said [emphasis mine]:
I think that both the process and the plan were flawed. We were trying to do something that was very hard to do, and we made a lot of mistakes.
Perhaps the reason that so many proposals for health care reform go down to either defeat or disappointment, follow the laws of unintended consequences, and/or face the prospect of running out of money (take a look at Medicare today) is that, just as Hillary said, health care reform is “very hard to do” successfully. And despite Democrat rhetoric, that’s not because mean old Republicans get Harry and Louise to tell terrible lies about it, or Angry White Men are racist yahoos who reflexively hate Obama and every proposal that comes out of his mouth. No, it’s inherent in health care reform itself. These are some of the very basic problems with any health care reform bill:
(1) Good health care is extremely expensive, and cutting costs will always mean denial of benefits. And even if the rhetoric says that only the unnecessary fat will be cut, medicine is not a good enough science that we can tell in advance what’s a necessary test or procedure and what is not.
(2) People logically assume that insuring everyone will have to cost more money, and they also know that there’s no magic way to get that money. People are also aware that government estimates of the cost of programs are usually underestimates, sometimes by a large factor.
(3) People are especially wary of government control over this particular aspect of their lives because it is so personal and so vital at the same time.
(4) Government-run enterprises are generally distrusted, and considered inefficient and intrusive. People know that from past and present experience.
(5) In this country there is still a widely-held philosophical strain of belief in personal initiative and responsibility rather than nanny-statism. This is in contrast to the belief system of European populations, and so it’s no surprise that European governments have encountered far less resistance to government involvement in health care than is found in this country.
Therefore it’s no surprise that the US has failed to pass universal health care so far, and especially a public option. And it’s also no surprise that there’s been a great deal lot of opposition to Obamacare, since the basic problems presented by the five points above have been compounded by the fact that the rhetoric of those pushing the bill has been entirely unconvincing in its attempts at reassurance.
In fact, the behavior of Obama and the Democratic Congress around the present proposals have made things far worse. It is statements such as the following (from Obama’s recent Portsmouth appearance) that ring alarm bells for that portion of the public paying attention:
[A]sked…how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following:
“If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete.”
Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers?…
Government programs aren’t self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be off the hook.
It doesn’t take an economist to know that, either. It’s a basic fact of government life that most people are privy to.
So, what did Obama mean when he said that? I certainly couldn’t say. Once again, the questions appear to be: is he that ignorant? Or is he that much of a liar, and does he think the American public is that ignorant?
And does it really matter which it is at this point?
