Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, January 30, 2009 3:31:06 PM
Kimberly Strassel
gives the Obama administration credit for learning from history with
their stimulus package. Not from the history of economics — the
package pretty much entails a What Not To Do aggregation of New Deal
ignorance — but from the history of health-care nationalization.
Rather than attempt it honestly, as Bill and Hillary Clinton did in
1993, Obama has hidden nuggets of it within the so-called stimulus bill
that passed the House (via Power Line)
Rahm Emanuel once advised that crisis means opportunity, and the
Democrats have taken that message to heart. They’ve exploited the
sense of economic crisis in order to build a Trojan Horse stimulus bill
that encompasses all of their legislative goals — and they’re trying to
stampede people into supporting it out of panic. Hope and Change?
More like Fear and Loathing.
What this does has nothing to do with stimulating the economy.
Worse, it exponentially increases the difficulty in reforming
entitlements, and Medicare already was the one program most in need of
reform. It’s heading into insolvency even without the
additional load of ten million new and unplanned subscribers in three
weeks. Now, we will have even more subscribers to throw into the
reform grinder, making it more painful than ever to effect the
necessary changes to bring the program back into solvency.
And how do the Democrats plan to make this work? They want to kill the one part of the program that actually receives
payments. Medicare Advantage is exactly the kind of public/private
partnership that could rescue Medicare, where recipients buy
supplemental coverage to make Medicare work for them better and extend
the bargaining power to reduce costs at the same time. Democrats want
to kill that program and force all MA patients back to the poor
coverage Medicare alone provides.
This demonstrates what a disaster this stimulus bill is, and what a
disaster Democratic rule in Washington will be over the next two
years. It’s hard to believe one could credibly say this, but I long
for the honesty of the Clintons.