Below The Beltway

David Frum contemplates the political landscape if the current campaign against the President’s health care reform plan succeeds:

What would it mean to “win” the healthcare fight?

For some, the answer is obvious: beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself.

The problem is that if we do that… we’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus immense pressure for future tax increases, (3) small businesses and self-employed individuals priced out of the insurance market, and (4) a lot of uninsured or underinsured people imposing costs on hospitals and local governments.

(…)

Even worse will be the way this fight is won: basically by convincing older Americans already covered by a government health program, Medicare, that Obama’s reform plans will reduce their coverage. In other words, we’ll have sent a powerful message to the entire political system to avoid at all hazards any tinkering with Medicare except to make it more generous for the already covered.

If we win, we’ll trumpet the success as a great triumph for liberty and individualism. Really though it will be a triumph for inertia. To the extent that anybody in the conservative world still aspires to any kind of future reform and improvement of America’s ossified government, that should be a very ashy victory indeed.

In some sense, this would mirror exactly what happened after the Clinton health care plan in 1993. Yes, it was a bad plan, but when the Republicans took over Congress a year later, they never bothered to follow-up with a proposal of their own to fix a system that, even then, was teetering on the edge of an abyss. In fact, the only significant health care bill to make it through Congress was Medicare Part D, the biggest increase in the welfare state in decade. And that occurred under a Republican President and a Republican Congress.

Frum’s other point is worthy of consideration, as well. Victory in the health care fight, in the sense of defeating the plan currently before Congress, is a good thing in the long run, but how that victory is attained is just as important. And if it’s done by fear-mongering and lying, then is it really a victory ?