Topic: Liberal Fascism
Is Obamacare really a good idea? Who knows?
There’s not one single individual person in America, the world or this quadrant of the Galaxy who understands the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. Barack Obama doesn’t understand it, nor does anybody in his administration, nor does anybody in Congress, academia or the media. There are some people who will tell you that they understand it, but such people are either lying to you or to themselves. Now this may strike you as a provocative statement, barfed out by an Obama opponent (me) who’s just trying to get a rise out of the President’s adorers. But it isn’t. I’m stating no more than the truth.
The original ACA legislation ran to 2,800 pages and most members of Congress—both those who supported and those who opposed it—didn’t read the whole thing. What was the point? As then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained, the only way to find out what was in the bill was to pass it. So congressional Democrats did pass it—but even so we’re none the wiser. How could that be?
By the end of 2013, the regulations required to implement Obamacare already ran to more than 10,000 small-print pages. Think about that. Is it plausible—is it even possible—that somewhere in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy there exists an oracle who understands how those 2,800 pages of legislation and 10,000+ pages of regulations work together to protect patients and make healthcare more affordable? Of course not. Even before the first regulation was promulgated, the length and complexity of the ACA was such that no one really understood how it would work in practice. Practically from day one the Obama Administration found itself issuing waivers, making exceptions and reinterpreting legislative language in a desperate attempt to keep the whole thing from collapsing under the weight of its own complications. Policy wonks tend to be contemptuous of the Law of Unintended Consequences. But their very desire to nail everything down, to cover all the bases, to address every possible situation, drives them to pile complications upon elaborations upon contingencies. And it is in this tangled labyrinth of wonkiness that the Law of Unintended Consequences does it most destructive work.
In 2009, uberwonk Ezra Klein, then with the Washington Post, opined that it was “silly” for members of Congress to read the ACA before passing it. They could never understand it, he sniffed, and neither could the public. The implication was, of course, that Ezra Klein, with his deep understanding of the legislative process and deep-dyed wonkiness did understand it. Therefore America: Don’t worry! Be happy!
But of course we can see now that Ezra Klein and his tribe no more understand Obamacare than they do particle physics. Neither do I. And neither do you. We’ll all just have to live with Obamacare to find out how it works—or doesn’t work. Now I ask you, is this any way to reform American healthcare?
