The Fantasy World of the Statist

Fantasies explode on contact with reality

by james holmes

Democrats are now requesting, nay expecting, nay demanding that Republicans cooperate with them to save ObamaCare by reforming it. For example, President Obama's former economic advisor Larry Summers blames the failure of ObamaCare on "the systematic effort of the president’s opponents to delegitimize and undermine the project."

"It is disingenuous for those who stood ready to turn any regulatory detail into an attack ad to profess outrage when guidance was not provided during an election campaign. It is hypocritical for those who held up confirmations of key officials with responsibility for managing federal health-care programs and whose behavior deterred many people from coming into government to lash out at the incompetence of government management. And it is indefensible to refuse to appropriate money to carry out a program and then attack it for being under-resourced.

"There is a line that must be respected between political opposition and conscious subversion. Everyone understands that when the country is at war, even a war a person may oppose, vigorous oversight is essential, but, in the end, there is an obligation to support American troops. In the same way, history will not judge kindly those who, having lost political debates over policy, go beyond vigorous oversight and seek to subvert enacted programs."

Let's leave aside the dishonesty of blaming a "refusal to appropriate money" for the fact that the administration couldn't build a website after spending between $175 and $300 million. Consider the overall message: that political opposition to ObamaCare as the equivalent of wartime subversion.

This is the consequence of supporting a major piece of legislation with a lie. When things go wrong, you have to keep on maintaining that lie through attempts to suppress the truth by suppressing the political opposition.

This is a vile argument, but it's also a bluff. It comes, not from a position of power, but from a position of desperation.

Did Summers mention funding and cooperation from the states? Consider what has happened in Oregon.

"With a reputation as a pacesetter in health care, Oregon laid out bold plans for complying with the federal overhaul.

"The state wouldn’t just create a health insurance exchange, a complicated undertaking in its own right. Oregon officials set out to build one of the biggest and best in the nation—a model that other states would want to copy.

"But more than a month after Cover Oregon’s online enrollment was supposed to launch, reality is lagging far behind Gov. John Kitzhaber’s grand ideas. The online system still doesn’t work, and the exchange has yet to enroll a single person in health insurance."

Oregon has spent more then $300 million so far to accomplish, basically, nothing.

No wonder Megan McArdle notes that the administration's general attitude, unlike Summers's, is quiescent.

"For the past four years, insurers have been a punching bag of the administration and the Democratic Party. Whenever insurers did something the administration didn’t like as a result of the new health-care law, Democrats punched back, hard, with complaints about greedy insurers who were blaming the White House for their own failures. Not this time."

The administration is beginning to realize that they're going to need a lot of help if they're going to be able to do anything to salvage ObamaCare.

The Nation's Harold Pollack puts on a happy face and predicts that the very fact that ObamaCare is a mess will encourage greater cooperation to fix it.

"It’s been a tough month, dominated by failures of rather astonishing proportions....

"[I]nstead of being a moment of pride, October 1 was a moment of great confusion, embarrassment and disappointment....

"But sooner or later, Healthcare.gov will work, and Republican governors will grasp that bipartisan cooperation with the Obama administration is in their best interest.

"The Obama administration has been chastened by its poor rollout performance. It needs practical and political help from Republicans—not from Republicans in Washington, who have little incentive to collaborate, but from Republican state office-holders who have actual responsibilities to govern who will eventually own their state’s version of healthcare reform."

But Pollack names in passing the reason why this isn't going to happen.

"Democrats need Republican buy-in for health reform to secure public legitimacy and to help millions of needy people. Democrats also need the administrative capacity of state governments, willingly deployed, to make healthcare reform actually work."

Well, they should have thought about that before they shoved the thing through on a party-line vote and spent years vilifying the Republicans for criticizing it. So what are they counting on? Once the law was passed, they were counting on the Republicans to drop their opposition and play along. Or maybe after the Supreme Court declined to strike down the law, or maybe after President Obama was re-elected in 2012. Eventually, Republicans were supposed to take the law as a given, accept it, and cooperate with Democrats to improve it.

"Republicans must realize that this isn’t November 2010, when they might plausibly have overturned ACA in Congress or in the courts. That moment has passed too. Health reform is a reality."

So they were depending on the law's political opponents to drop their opposition. Yet the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare and its continuing problems have completely undermined that calculation.

A new poll indicates that President Obama now has a negative approval rating on the health care issue.

"Less than a fifth of Americans think their health care will improve in the next year because of the law. And voters widely oppose the ACA by 55 percent to 39 percent. They are almost equally divided on whether or not the president 'knowingly deceived' the public when he said the insured could keep their coverage plans if they liked them."

This call for help in "fixing" ObamaCare is just another example of the fantasy thinking that produced this disaster in the first place. The law's backers seemed to think that they could suspend the laws of economics and mathematics, providing massive benefits with no costs; that individuals would somehow stop responding to actual economic incentives and instead do what central planners wished they would do; that the planners could understand, predict, and control all the consequences of a massive, vaguely defined overhaul of one-sixth of the economy; and that the federal government would somehow become a model of efficiency in building large systems, creating an online health insurance market that would make Jeff Bezos green with envy.

Then, on top of all that, they expected the opposition to stop opposing.

This, like the rest of the fantasies, exploded on contact with reality.