Legal Commentary

Mickey Kaus is an extremely talented blogger.  He gets the medium.  He focuses on a few core issues and then keeps hitting them, over and over, so that you see events unfolding through his perspective.  I think he has been spot-on about the health care debate from the beginning.  His point is:

Obama could have proposed a bill that expanded coverage and raised taxes to pay for it. True, that would have pissed off voters who really don't like tax increases. Instead, he proposed raising taxes and instituting some ominously vague, to-be-determined, 'scientific' and anti-democratic restraints on health care treatments. This successfully pissed off voters who really don't like tax increases and voters--mainly older voters--worried about being denied treatments. The combination of losing the anti-government voters and losing seniors may prove fatal.

I think Obama's error is of the "best and the brightest" type.  There was an elite consensus -- e.g., Atul Gawande and his McAllen, Texas example -- that in health care we're overtesting and overtreating and overpaying.  But the solution -- at least, the solution proposed thus far -- is worse than the cure.  As Kaus says:

Funny, I would think health care reform would be judged effective if, say ... all Americans, however rich or poor, can get the health care they need, including the latest advances in life-saving and life-enhancing treatments. If reform accomplishes that, but the health care sector winds up as 20 percent of GDP, will it really be a failure? Why? As long as it's paid for who is Al Hunt to tell Americans how much of their GDP they should spend keeping themselves alive?

After all, what should we be spending money on?  iPhones?  New cars?  Kaus's position here is actually more progressive than the administration's.

I think Obama and his aides have really messed up the sales pitch on this issue.  It's probably too late to go back.  One question I have: where are the rallies of people who would benefit from this bill?  If fears of a deficit or an esoteric "loss of freedom" can turn out thousands, why not people whose lives could actually be saved by this bill?  Someone should be organzing those rallies.  SEIU?