Not FDR, but another eminent politician of the 1930's, Kingfish Huey Long. That, at least, is what I thought after reading the President’s pitch at his campaign stop health care forum in he Philadelphia suburbs. His principal – practically his only – argument was that greedy health insurance companies deploy monopoly power to charge too much for their policies. Therefore, Congress must enact Obamacare.
One could say a great deal about that argumentum ad odium, starting with the facts that health insurance is not a strikingly profitable business and that premiums already must pass muster with state insurance commissioners (many of them elected officials ambitious to rise to higher office). One might note, too, that the best way to unsettle alleged monopolistic practices in particular states would be to expand the market by allowing insurance purchases across state lines.
What truly puts the speech in the Huey Long category, though, is that the Senate bill the President wants the House to pass, and that he will then sign into law, has no provision for federal regulation of insurance rates. If one accepts credulously that insurance company greed is the problem and federal price controls the solution, Obamacare is irrelevant. Any federal oversight would have to be legislated separately. The reconciliation process is almost certainly not available, because the proposal has no discernible budgetary impact. Hence, the chances of passage are effectively nil. There certainly aren’t 60 votes in the Senate, where every Republican opposes price controls. Probably some Democrats are against them, too, either on policy grounds or because state insurance regulators have plenty of political influence and won’t take kindly to having a big chunk of their domain handed over to the feds.
The President would make just as much sense if he declared that closing Gitmo will bend the health cost curve downward, or that his carbon cap-and-tax scheme is the best way to prevent unsound credit default swaps. The gulf between rhetoric and even an approximate version of reality rapidly widens. It’s no wonder that the crew of the White House ship are scrambling to make sure that on one mistakes them for captain.
It looks like you type like I do. The punch line at the end reads "...scrambling to make sure that on one mistakes them for captain." But I suspect you meant to say that "... NO one mistakes them for captain."
But your comment is very good!
Posted by: Paul | Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 03:46 AM