The current battle over “health care reform” is a great example of why representative government frustrates.
It’s not just that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the Democrats’ bill didn’t get their way. It’s that the proponents of socialized medicine (and that’s the real goal, here: The eventual complete government takeover of medicine) are playing a sort of obstacle-course race … as I argued yesterday.
Meanwhile, how the anti-Obamacare message hits Washington vexes, too.
Some partisan pundits and pollsters go so far as to say that the Democrats’ reform legislation suffers because it lacks a good name. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a catchy moniker. “Obamacare,” used primarily by its opponents, is super-catchy. And the Republicans repeal effort is pretty clever: “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.”
Though “job-killing” may reference a hot, current topic, it is far from the most salient thing one might say against the Democrats’ rushed-through plan.
Standard politics: Even when politicians do the right thing, they push it for the wrong reason.
Media folk are now beginning to spin the popular opposition to Obamacare. Carefully worded polls “prove” that Americans aren’t overwhelmingly against the plan.
Which misses the real point: Incredulity. Democrats ballyhooed the notion that further government intervention into medicine would reduce costs. Nonsense, of course. And Americans know it.
That common-sense skepticism is precisely what gets lost in all the politics.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.