






    * * *

    Back to ObamaCare.




    “Voilà. You now have the single-payer system you wanted.” “Everybody wins. You get expansion, Republicans get cost control, the system is made more secure, and the public for once isn’t terrified.”

    Would it make Republicans happy to think they beat Obama back on his original boondoggle? Sure. “But people will start referring to the National Health Service every day, and they’ll believe they have one, and they’ll believe you gave it to them. And you can run in ’12 saying you did. That’s what I’d do!”

    I still believe FDR was more or less right. It was 2009, Obama had just been elected, we looked to be at the beginning of a big liberal wave. America was anxious, coming to terms with a terrible recession, maybe worse than that. And everyone knew the health-care system was a mess. There would have been plenty of space for turning it around by cleaning up and repairing, and then broadening, deepening and enriching, the health structure we already had. And not inventing a new one.

    Comprehensive new programs have a million moving parts. Programs with a million moving parts are less likely to succeed. ObamaCare hasn’t, and won’t.

    * * *

    A final word on Democrats on the Hill and ObamaCare. In the past month they’ve dealt with the disaster through talking points. That’s what parties in duress do, have kids in the back room write press releases based on the pushback guidance of combative consultants. Those talking points have gone, more or less, from “heavy demand caused the website to crash” to “the website will soon be fixed” to “every big program has bumps at the beginning” to “wait till the American people see their benefits!” to “not that many policies have been cancelled” to “not that many premiums have gone up” to “not that many people will lose their doctors.

    Not one of the talking points has worked. Because incoming data, day by day, kept washing over them and sinking them.

    The new talking point is that ObamaCare was damaged and fell due to Republican “sabotage.” Republicans on Capitol Hill refused to vote for it, refused to like it and support it. They tried repeatedly to repeal it and defund it.

    And all this is true. But it is not sabotage. This is opposition. The Republicans thought the ACA a bad piece of work, a bad bill that would make things worse, not better.

    Still, Republicans should take the sabotage charge seriously, because it is not a claim aimed at the consideration of the American people but of history. Democrats are admitting with this charge that ObamaCare is a disaster. They no longer want to argue that it is not. They are arguing that it is a disaster brought about by Republicans. That will be what they argue for history and feed their journalistic historians.

    As I remember it, the Democrats on Capitol Hill got the bill they wanted. They were heady, back in the majority, with a new and popular president, and they didn’t much care about GOP support. They wanted the credit: It was their bill. They wrote it in a way no Republican could support. And they got no Republican support. When Paul Ryan, who had emerged as the Republican point man, attempted to come forward with ideas, he was rebuffed.

    The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work, and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

    Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness (it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.