ObamaCare vs. iPhone thinking
Posted by Richard on October 30, 2009
The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful opinion piece by Daniel Henninger that I think really explains why the polling numbers have gone so south on all the variations of ObamaCare (and on Obama and Congress, too):
In a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice, the Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits all legislation since 1965. And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin D. Roosevelt had in 1939.
…
Everything about the health-care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it. Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark—all were elected to Congress in the 1970s, and live on as the immortals in Washington's Forever Land. But it's more than the fact that Congress looks old. The health-care bill is big, complex, incomprehensible and coercive—all the things people hate nowadays.
…
The larger point here isn't necessarily partisan. It's a description of the way people live their lives in a 21st century world, and how disconnected politics has become from that world.
If we were really living in the world of leading-edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Obama, he would have proposed an iPhone for health care—a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health-care apps that suited their needs. Over time, with trial and error, a better system would emerge.
No chance of that. Our outdated political software can't recognize trial and error. What ObamaCare is doing with health care—the "public option"—may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it's starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go. Wait until EPA's ghost busters start enforcing cap-and-trade.
I think he's spot-on, but the House Democrats certainly don't get it. They're doubling down — almost literally. After declaring the other day that they want a do-over (I think they called it a "reset"), they've now revealed that they have a new, improved health care bill. The old one was 1012 pages. The new one is just shy of 2000.
No, I don't plan to read it.
David Bryant said
”No, I don’t plan to read it.”
There’s a fairly good description of the bill’s contents and probable effects in the Wall Street Journal today (Monday, 2 November).