Wrong Way Still

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Health Care: A beleaguered White House apparently has abandoned its government-run option. Even so, ObamaCare will still be a thousand-page, trillion-dollar step toward socialized medicine.

President Bill Clinton and his erstwhile adviser Dick Morris liked to "triangulate." Top Obama political aide David Axelrod told Politico that the president's post-August recess strategy on health care will be to "synthesize and harmonize."

The administration intends to drop the controversial "public option" to rival private employer plans. Independent health care experts have warned that the artificially low premiums and other enticements a government plan would offer could lead to tens of millions of customers lost for private insurers — and thus the collapse of the health insurance industry.

The president's liberal base won't like the concession. But the key point in the Politico report is that "some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one."

"Incremental" means that even without the public option, Democrats will still be trying to take America's health care system — the best, most envied in the world — to the same destination. Just not so fast.

And what might that destination be? Single payer, which means a total government takeover.

President Obama told the AFL-CIO in 2003 that he was "a proponent of single-payer universal health care coverage . . . that's what I'd like to see."

And in the spring of 2007, he told the Service Employees International Union that it would take time "to eliminate employer coverage" — maybe 10 years, maybe 15 or 20 years.

Right now, however, getting even anything looks like a long shot. A recent NBC poll pegged the president's health care approval rating at only 41%. And as Health Policy and Strategy Associates President Robert Laszewski noted this week: "Doing just health insurance reform would cost something close to a trillion dollars" and "the bills on the table so far have had little in the way of real cost containment."

Keith Hennessey, former Senate aide and economic policy head in the Bush White House, believes there is a 50% chance of a scaled-down bill becoming law, featuring an individual mandate to buy health coverage.

But even that "leads to $100 billion to $200 billion of spending over 10 years" in the form of "more Medicare money for doctors, combined with expansions of Medicaid for the poor," plus "some of the Kerry tax increase proposal" on private insurers, sure to be paid for by their customers.

"This would be an 'incremental' package that advocates would argue is a small step in the right direction," Hennessey writes.

But as angry constituents have been telling their representatives this summer, ObamaCare goes in the wrong direction. Improving the greatest health care system in the world means going in the direction of more consumer choice.

The medical deductibility that gives employers the incentive to provide health coverage should be reconsidered. Regulations should be reduced and tax-free health savings accounts expanded.

These steps would make it practical for Americans, as individuals, to buy portable, affordable health insurance policies that fit their needs directly — featuring, say, a high deductible for routine costs — the same way we buy other forms of insurance.

This president's slogan is "change." This summer's public outcry demands that he fundamentally change his approach on health care and realize that government is not the answer.