In a piece written late last night, I noted:
Americans were roughly evenly divided on Obamacare in mid-summer polls, but the average on Pollster.com now shows that 54.7 percent oppose the legislation and only 38.5 percent support it. A CNN poll in early December found a stunning 61 percent opposing the bill.
This morning, USA Today/Gallup puts support at 46 percent and opposition at 48 percent — which actually counts as good news for Obamacare supporters – and the Washington Post puts it at 44 percent support, 51 percent oppose.
I could understand a senator voting for legislation that is unpopular, but that one thinks either is necessary (to make a bad situation better), or will become more popular over time. But this plan is likely to get much, much more unpopular over time.
I wonder how many senators could continue to claim the plan will work smoothly under the influence of, say, sodium pentathol. For starters, the aim of the legislation is to bring more patients into a system that already lacks enough general practitioners.
A poll of doctors by Investors Business Daily suggested that 45 percent of doctors would consider quitting if the bill passed. Let’s presume that’s an exaggeration by a factor of four. That would still mean that 11 percent of the nation’s doctors would hang up their stethoscopes.
The plan is to cut costs by eliminating “unnecessary” tests, but the recent reaction to the recommendations about mammograms suggests that the public is wary about sudden redefinitions of what constitutes “unnecessary.”
The plan is to cut waste, fraud, and abuse . . . of course, you don’t need thousands of pages of legislation to do that, and we’ve been hearing that promise for as long as we can remember.
And of course, the new system looks like this:
In other words, unless this is the one time in a million that implementing a reform is easier and less complicated than passing it, the absolute best-case scenario of life under Obamacare is that it’s going to be a bureaucratic nightmare, but only for the first few years.
So most senators are likely to cast votes that will cost them reelection, for an unpopular bill, for a change that is likely to grow even more unpopular with time. You’ll be swearing at the 60 [expletives of your choice] in the Senate and the more-than-218 in the House for years to come, as you grow a long white beard in your doctor’s waiting room, flipping through the several-years-old copy of Newsweek with the cover story of “Why Obama Rocks.”