Why the Democrats must go forward ALONE on Health Care Reform

Jonathan Chait, of the usually-center-left journal The New Republic, has the highest praise for the star quality of President Obama:

President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.

Not everyone agrees that President Obama was the single, standout performer at the recent health care "summit". The detail-oriented Tom Maguire lets some air out of Chait's balloon with some inconvenient facts like:

"Numerous Democrats in the room have explained why it's not possible to ban insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions without also covering everybody and subsidizing those who afford it. (Short answer: people would just game the system, going without insurance until they get sick.)"

Wait a second! Mr. Chait may have forgotten, but back in the endless Democratic primaries we sat through debate after debate in which Obama argued that mandates were not necessary. And he won both the nomination and the election! Was Obama an idiot conservative back then, or a disingenuous liar? And whence sprang any sort of a public mandate for these new mandates?

Maguire gets an assist from James Taranto:

The Great Condescender

No one holds a candle to Barack Obama when it comes to making smart liberals feel superior.

Remember that car insurance story the President told at the "Summit"? Maguire finds in that story the rationale for the Democrats' belief that they need to take over health care decisions from Americans:

So what does this anecdote from the Great Communicator tells us? Well, it might tell us he is as dumb as a bag of rocks for not understanding the difference between liability and collision insurance.

But let's give him the benefit if the doubt! I am trying to think like a Lib here, so bear with me - the moral of the story seems to be that even Barack Obama, future editor of the Harvard Law Review and President of the United States, found simple insurance decisions utterly mystifying and had no idea what he had actually purchased. . . .

Furthermore, despite his utter confusion Obama apparently blundered to the common (and thriftier) conclusion, since no one buys collision on a junker.

However, months later he realized that paying more for collision would have been a great idea, so history is re-written. It is now due to ACME's rapaciousness that they are unwilling to right this wrong and write him a check. And they laughed! . . . After the laughter died they should have explained to the college grad that he could file a third-party claim against the other driver, assuming Obama was not at fault, but that also may have been too confusing.

Well. If even Obama can be duped by greedy insurers into saving his money and taking a sensible risk, what hope do the rest of us have? Surely we need these new health insurance mandates to make sure both that we buy policies and that the policies we buy have everything we need, not just everything we (stupidly think we) want.

This is classic, generic Democratic paternalism - people can't be trusted to make their own decisions and they certainly should not be expected to endure the consequences of those decisions.

Young Barack should never have been allowed to buy liability-only insurance that didn't cover damage to his junker. Barack, Nancy and Harry will protect us from our own deplorable decision making on the health care front.

Video here, plus from the comment thread:

this is what happens when entitlement meets ignorance. . .

The fact that he compares health insurance to "compulsory" auto insurance is another joke. Every state I have lived in requires proof of financial responsibility, not insurance. You are not REQUIRED to buy insurance, you could instead post a bond. Why? It's probably not legal to require the purchase of a product or service, even for a privilege. . . .

Of course, the whole idea of the Democratic plan is to force you to purchase (either directly or indirectly, through reduced wages so your employer can pay for them) expensive, bloated-up policies from the same insurance companies the Democrats have been demonizing, so that you will come to hate those companies and turn for relief to a single-payer health care system. Then the rationing and Canadian-style delays will begin in ernest. Because it's the only "fair" way. No more "It's my health, it's my choice" for either Americans or lucky Canadians.

The Democrats' intentions are so good, and for the Left, good intentions are all-important. Their vastly increased power by way of controlling medical care for all Americans is just a fortunate side-benefit for the party of Big Government. Andy McCarty:

Today's Democrats are controlled by the radical Left, and it is more important to them to execute the permanent transformation of American society than it is to win the upcoming election cycles. They have already factored in losing in November — even losing big. For them, winning big now outweighs that. I think they're right.

I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership's statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. I'm glad Republicans have held firm, but let's not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

This is the only explanation of their "suicidal" push to pass this horrible bill that makes sense to me. Lots of government appointments waiting for Blue Dogs who lose elections in November.