As the backlash against President Obama’s strategy for health-care reform mounts, he decided it is time to address the nation yet again in hopes of mustering support. My advice to him is to continue on his and the Democratic leaders’ current track of ignoring all inconvenient facts in the push to nationalize our health-care system. For example, the president must certainly not acknowledge, much less engage, the letter that a group of model health-care systems, including the much noted Intermountain Health and Mayo Clinic, sent Congressman Ron Kind explaining how they “suffer great financial loss” from treating Medicare patients and that a public plan would put even “the nation’s most efficient, high quality providers” out of business.
He’s been getting so much mileage touting the efficiency of government, the virtues of Medicare, and the promises of a public plan that it would not be wise to engage this issue. He can take comfort in the model of the more experienced Senators Kennedy and Baucus who actually published an article in the Wall Street Journal creating urgency for health care reform a day after most of its major points were refuted in testimony by Doug Elmendorf, the director of the CBO. I noticed but the inconsistencies didn’t impede progress on the Hill.
Similarly, he should certainly not engage Sunday’s article in the New York Times magazine by Princeton professor Peter Singer that called for explicit rationing in publicly provided health insurance. The article was well written and reasoned, relying on insights from Stalin and a tired joke about hookers, but its conclusions might not sit well with a public promised more health care for less money. This might bring up questions regarding whether the average American may actually pay more for health care if they were to include the cost of increased payroll taxes, income taxes, junk food taxes, cigarette taxes, amusement park taxes, carbon taxes, income taxes, and the premiums for a new supplemental private health-care plan they must purchase to avoid the humane rationing of the new public plan that replaced their former private employer plan that they were promised they’d never lose but did, nonetheless.
Most certainly, he must not mention the $2,500 annual savings he promised on the campaign trail. It will be too difficult to explain how that’s a reduction off the future increase from the present trendline that would have occurred in the absence of bold federal action. Just keep promising more coverage for less money due to the efficiency of the federal government. It’s got him this far.
— Sally C. Pipes is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care.