ObamaCare must fail in long term, but conservatives can’t stop it now

By David McElroy · September 23, 2013

Conservatives have been fighting ObamaCare in one way or another since 2009. Republicans in Congress lost the battle and Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law in 2010. The battle didn’t end there. With the law’s key provisions going into effect in slightly more than 90 days, some Republicans still haven’t given up on the fantasy that they can stop it.

The best chance to stop the law was when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to its constitutionality. Because of Chief Justice John Roberts’ bizarre defection from the conservative bloc of the court, most of ObamaCare was upheld on a 5-4 vote. The only other real chance to stop the law from being implemented was the 2012 presidential election. Even though Mitt Romney had championed a similar plan when he was governor of Massachusetts, he campaigned against the law because … well … that’s what conservatives wanted him to do.

Romney was an uninspiring candidate and lost badly. The chief sponsor of ObamaCare was re-elected. The battle was over.

But some conservatives are obsessed with the fantasy that they can stop the law by withholding the funding for it. The U.S. House passed a bill last week that would keep the government operating past the end of September, but Republicans didn’t include money to fund ObamaCare in their bill. The Democratic-controlled Senate obviously won’t pass the bill, so there’s something of a deadlock.

Some Republicans say they’re willing to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if they can’t pass a budget without ObamaCare funding. Although I wish it were possible that something this wonderful — a shutdown — would happen, we all know that government isn’t going to really shut down. Even the most optimistic scenario would see “non-essential” government agencies closed for a few days. (It maddens me that we have “non-essential” parts of government. I think the whole thing is non-essential, but if even the mainstream sees certain parts as non-essential, why are we paying for them?)

If certain Republicans go through with their threat to shut the government down, they’re going to lose. It’s political suicide. Although I’m quite happy to see government — pretty much any parts of it — shut down, most people don’t feel this way. There will be a steady drumbeat from both the media and Democrats about the immaturity and irresponsibility of Republicans. For days or weeks, the pressure would mount — and Republicans would eventually be forced to cave in. (There would also be quite an internal battle during that process.)

So what would they accomplish by this? Absolutely nothing useful. They would spend political capital to do nothing more than pander to their conservative base. And when the smoke finally clears, another budget will pass — and funding for ObamaCare will be part of that funding. So they’re playing a stupid political game that their core supporters love, but which is only going to reduce their broader support.

Anyone who understands basic economics can understand why this plan won’t work in the long run. Most people can understand why it’s going to cost everyone far more money than Obama and Democrats promised. As those already covered by insurance see their health coverage become even more expensive, it’s clear (and will become even more clear) that the new law won’t achieve what it set out to do. It’s going to cost massively more than its sponsors promised and it’s not going to deliver care for everyone.

When that happens, one of two things is going to happen. Democrats will argue that Republicans prevented the plan from being funded properly — and that it would have worked fine if not for this interference — so we need to move all the way to a fully socialist single-payer plan. (That’s what I think has been the Democrats’ end game all along. I think they’ve known this can’t work.)

On the other hand, if Republicans set themselves up from the beginning to document the failure of the law as it was enacted, they could gain political capital by being the reasonable people who predicted what was going to happen. If they could do a responsible and reasonable job of showing what’s likely to happen as the law is enacted, they could show that they understood what was coming.

If they sought the support of those swing voters whose insurance premiums are skyrocketing, they could put together a plan to win back the Senate and potentially repeal the law after the 2014 elections.

Republicans have a reasonable path to changing the law, but it’s only by gaining the support of swing voters as they’re affected by the law and then using the legislative mechanism to repeal the law. The efforts of people such as Sen. Ted Cruz to prevent funding the law are doomed to fail — and they’re doomed to make it more difficult to repeal the law after the 2014 elections.

ObamaCare is bad law and bad economics. Government meddling created the problem with expensive health care. Doing even more meddling isn’t going to fix it. Most of those who read here know that. But making yourself appear irresponsible in the eyes of the people who will hold the swing votes in congressional elections next year isn’t going to change the reality of where we stand.

Of course, I think it’s just one more event in a long string of events that will bring about an economic and social collapse, so I have trouble worrying too much about it either way — since I don’t think anything can stop the collapse.

But if you still want to play the political game — and spit into the wind in an effort to change things — the kind of brinksmanship that some conservatives want to play right now is a losing strategy. There are some times when you have to admit reality and move on.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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