RALEIGH – President Barack Obama traveled to North Carolina last week in an attempt to reverse the decline in his job-approval ratings and in the likelihood that his health care plan will get through Congress.
It didn’t work.
One of the reasons why has to do with timing. The president’s message was about eight months out of synch. He acted as though he was still running for president – savaging Republicans and demonizing health insurers while repeating his old campaign promises. But this isn’t the fall of 2008. Reliving his glory days isn’t going to cut it.
Back then, Obama kept his verbage simple and reassuring. He said his approach wouldn’t force anyone to buy health plans, or to change the health plans they already have. But now we know that the mandates, taxes, and regulations in the Obama plan would unravel the private insurance market, leaving tens of millions of Americans with no choice but to enroll in a government-run scheme. Technically, it’s true that Washington would not be forcing individuals to change plans. Instead, it would be causing many employers to stop offering health plans, with the same outcome.
Back then, Obama was also running a dishonest ad campaign to scare voters about John McCain’s proposal to replace the tax exclusion for employer-based health benefits with individual tax credits. Now, as part of the revenue side of their plan, Obama and the Democratic Congress are considering a far-worse idea to tax some employer-based health benefits without replacing them with tax credits.
And back then, Obama could assert that his plan would simultaneously increase government health spending, tax only the wealthy, and reduce the cost of health care without expanding the budget deficit. Other than free-marketeers and partisan opponents, few challenged his math. Now, the Congressional Budget Office has demonstrated conclusively that the president’s plan doesn’t add up, not even close. Conservative and moderate Democrats have seen the numbers, and realize that voters would shellac them in 2010 if they passed the president’s plan.
In short, the major blows to Obama’s health care scheme haven’t come from nefarious insurers, greedy doctors, or the shrunken GOP minority. They’ve come from Democrats who reside in the real world and know how to use a calculator.
Public approval of the president’s job performance and handling of the health care issue has gone down as public understanding of the details and implications of ObamaCare has gone up. Asked in the abstract whether they’d like to see their fellow citizens obtain health insurance, most voters will say yes. But as voters begin to understand how the plan will affect them – through more regulations, mandates, deficits, and taxes – they become skeptical.
America’s current health care system is wasteful, unfair, and unsustainable. It has to change. But Americans are not convinced that the change must be immediate, that it must be radical, and that the proper response to previous and counterproductive government intervention in health care is to give politicians even more power over health care.
They want to build on the elements of the system that work, rather than take the risk of destroying them by coercing everyone into federally approved health care arrangements, be they administered by government or private vendors, that ignore personal preferences and invite perpetually politicized medicine.
Obama’s plan is based on false assumptions, pervasive myths, and bad faith. It’s having trouble in Congress because it deserves to, not because of some elaborate corporatist conspiracy or the awesome power of a decimated Republican Party.
The president can make as many speeches as he likes. But only by changing the content, not the decibel level, can he hope to turn things around.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation