Technocracy in America
Obama neglects the real 'public option': listening to the public.
by Matthew Continetti
09/21/2009, Volume 015, Issue 01
The partisan and misleading speech that President Obama delivered to a joint session of Congress last week revealed the president's preferences--more government mandates, regulations, and taxes--when it comes to refashioning the American health care system. It also showcased the contempt for debate and smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority that is now as much a part of contemporary liberalism as sympathy with the nuclear freeze movement and the RainbowPUSH coalition was two decades ago.
The way the president expresses his disdain is telling. He assumes that, given the facts, any rational person would reach policy conclusions identical to his. "I have no doubt," he said, "that these reforms would greatly benefit Americans from all walks of life, as well as the economy as a whole." If only everybody had read Atul Gawande's June New Yorker article on McAllen, Texas, the president believes, then there would have been none of those rowdy town halls.
So why has the White House already missed its self-imposed deadline for reform? Why do more Americans disapprove than approve of the president's approach to health care? Why did Obama's approval rating drop steadily--among independents, precipitously--throughout the summer? The answer, he said, is "all the misinformation that's been spread over the past few months." There is no legitimate basis for opposition. There are only lies.
"Americans have grown nervous about reform," the president continued. "Prominent politicians" whose "only agenda is to kill reform at any cost" have spread "bogus claims" about his health care plan, scaring a gullible public into disapproval. For example, there is the "misunderstanding" that "federal dollars will be used to fund abortions." Some also "claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants," which is "false." And the idea that "we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens" is a "lie."
The president said that he "will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead," and if "you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen." Tell that to the Republicans who have been shut out from the legislative process on four of the five congressional committees working on health care.
"I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it," Obama said, conveniently dismissing the widely held view that the best improvement to the Democrats' grandiose plans is to scuttle them and start over with a set of targeted insurance reforms--which could pass both houses of Congress with bipartisan majorities. No, Obama "won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are," as if he did not already have the backing of all the special interests--the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the American Association of Retired People, the American Hospital Association, Big Labor, etc. He "will not accept the status quo as a solution," as if that is what supporters of consumer-driven health care are advocating. "If you misrepresent what's in this plan," Obama said, "we will call you out."
Yet one could just as easily call out Obama for distorting the claims made against his proposals. In a world where money is fungible, Obamacare's taxpayer subsidies could indeed be used to purchase insurance plans that cover abortions. Furthermore, the president has not adequately explained how "the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally" when (1) Democrats in the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees defeated amendments that would have withheld benefits from illegal aliens, (2) the president has not put forward an effective verification system of his own, and (3) who would ever tell José and Maria No mas when they show up at the emergency room in need of care?
The president was correct when he said that his proposals do not include "panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens." But that is not quite what the "prominent politician" was saying when she wrote,
Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these "unproductive" members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care.
Indeed, in his speech last week Obama said himself that his plan will "eliminate" the "hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud" in Medicare and "create an independent commission of doctors and medical experts"--a panel, if you will--"charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead." It is no stretch of the imagination to think that one man's "waste" might one day turn out to be a senior citizen's preferred medical treatment.
Like it or not, Sarah Palin is making an argument about the possible tradeoffs and unintended consequences of Obamacare. Hers is an extrapolation based on an analysis of the facts. It is not a "lie," unless "lie" suddenly means "an argument with which I disagree."
By contrast, it was wishful thinking at best when the president claimed that "reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan." Politicians have been trying to clean up after the entitlement programs in such a manner since Jimmy Carter first used the phrase, but costs keep rising. This did not stop the president from ducking behind a political cliché rather than level with the public about the real price tag of universal health insurance. Obama would rather keep company with straw men than grapple with substantive criticisms.
To acknowledge that his critics act in good faith would shake the president's oversized self-confidence. He alone is in possession of the truth, the only honest broker in a den of conservative thieves, the heir to the noblest traditions of American history. In the final passage of his speech, Obama invoked the late Ted Kennedy, whose name for many people carries associations in addition to "large-heartedness" and a "concern and regard for the plight of others." Kennedy's "passion" for unreconstructed liberalism was "born not of some rigid ideology," Obama said. Rather, Kennedy knew that "sometimes government has to step in."
Now is one of those times, apparently. "This has always been the history of our progress," Obama said, raising the question of whether he believes progress is ever possible without government. The champions of progress, Obama concluded, are always "subject to scorn" and "attacked as un-American." When progress battles with reaction, he went on, "facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom." It gets to the point where "we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other." Guess who's to blame.
In recent months the characterization of Obama's opponents as a bunch of lying name-callers who do not care about facts, do not possess reason, advocate timidity and the status quo, and cannot "engage in a civil conversation" has become all too familiar. It is the natural outcome of an unstoppable force--the angry and arrogant left-wing of the Democratic party--running up against an immovable object--the instinctual conservatism of an American populace that is skeptical of complicated and expensive government interventions.
The upshot has been liberals who cavalierly demean and degrade the sentiments of the people. Liberals contemptuous of democracy and ready to embrace from-the-top, one-size-fits-all, technocratic solutions. For such liberals, the failure to obtain their policy preferences calls into question the very legitimacy of the American polity. In August, the Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein--who normally tries "not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree"--found himself, like Howard Beale, mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore: "Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers," he wrote, have "become political terrorists." Last week in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote that America's "one party democracy is worse" than China's "one party autocracy," because in China "one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century." In this week's Time magazine, Joe Klein worries that "the Limbaugh- and Glenn Beck-inspired poison will spread from right-wing nutters to moderates and independents who are a necessary component of Obama's governing coalition"; after all, if the moderates and independents knew what's good for them, they'd support Obamacare.
Isn't it possible, though, that the moderates, independents, and "right-wing nutters" who traveled to congressional town halls and voiced their opposition to the president's big-government initiatives do know what's good for them--or, at least, know that Obamacare may turn out to be bad for them? That it might be too costly and too onerous for an American economy with high unemployment and staggering fiscal imbalances? That today's reform, like others in the "history of our progress," may lead to unforeseen distortions and crises down the road? Fixated on its attempt to manipulate the economy in ways that produce its desired social outcomes, the White House has neglected the only real "public option": listening to the public. Determined to pass health care reform even over the objections of popular opinion, the Democrats are practicing a hubristic and antidemocratic politics.
And they will come to regret it.
Matthew Continetti is the associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. |
