Barack Obama

[randolph]

* The Wall Street Journal www.wsj.com

* OPINION: DECLARATIONS
* JANUARY 7, 2010, 6:33 P.M. ET

The Risk of Catastrophic Victory
Obama is in the midst of one. Can the GOP avert one of their own?

*
By PEGGY NOONAN

Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise.

If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, "You didn't even waste our time successfully."

What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008?expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran into the spirit of 2009?more dug in, more anxious, more bottom-line?and didn't notice. At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away.

This is an excellent article, well worth reading the rest of it.

[randolph]

OK, here's an answer to Peggy Noonan.
January 8, 2010, 12:11 pm
One health care reform, indivisible

Jonathan Chait reads Peggy Noonan, so I don?t have toPaul Krugman)

The public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous medical conditions. The administration could have had that?and the victory of it?last winter.

Instead, they were greedy for glory.

Chait explains why this is nonsense. But let me explain at fuller length, because this is one of the great misunderstood keys to the whole health care debate.

Start with the proposition that we don?t want our fellow citizens denied coverage because of preexisting conditions ? which is a very popular position, so much so that even conservatives generally share it, or at least pretend to.

So why not just impose community rating ? no discrimination based on medical history?

Well, the answer, backed up by lots of real-world experience, is that this leads to an adverse-selection death spiral: healthy people choose to go uninsured until they get sick, leading to a poor risk pool, leading to high premiums, leading even more healthy people dropping out.

So you have to back community rating up with an individual mandate: people must be required to purchase insurance even if they don?t currently think they need it.

But what if they can?t afford insurance? Well, you have to have subsidies that cover part of premiums for lower-income Americans.

In short, you end up with the health care bill that?s about to get enacted. There?s hardly anything arbitrary about the structure: once the decision was made to rely on private insurers rather than a single-payer system ? and look, single-payer wasn?t going to happen ? it had to be more or less what we?re getting. It wasn?t about ideology, or greediness, it was about making the thing work.

It's complicated, isn't it?