Liberal Columnist: One Way or Another, ObamaCare is Doomed

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Michael Cannon asks whether health care reform is doomed.  Democrats entertained a bunch of vague fantasies about some giant pool of money materializing from somewhere to close the gaps in the budget.  It hasn't, so they're stuck with, as Cannon points out, taxing Democrats:

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is the biggest opponent of Sen. Max Baucus' (D-MT) tax on expensive health plans because that tax would hit West Virginia coal miners.

Unions vigorously oppose that tax because it would hit their members.

Moderate Democrats in the House oppose Rep. Charlie Rangel's (D-NY) supposed "millionaires surtax" because they know it would hit small businesses in their districts.

Cannon says:

Once the shooting starts, industry opposition will sway even Democratic members, because there are physicians and hospitals and employers and insurance-industry employees in every state and congressional district.

Can President Obama and the congressional leadership satisfy both groups?  My guess is, probably not, and this misguided effort at "reform" will therefore die.  Again.

That's a bold prediction.  I'm skeptical.  I think it is more likely is that this thing passes, and fails spectacularly.  There are too many moving parts, and if any of them breaks, the whole thing rapidly starts to spin out of control and eat a gigantic hole in the deficit.  If it does break, I think that Democrats keep control of Congress just long enough to explain why they keep having to enact whopping new tax increases every few years.  Republicans don't need to improve their message.  They just have to wait for Democrats to recover their reputation as tax and spend politicians who woefully underpredict the cost of everything they propose.

Time will tell which one of us is right--if either.  This is one time I'd be happy for my predictions to fail in both directions.

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/10/is_health_care_reform_falling_1.php

It's worse than simply having too many moving parts: it's designed to pad the democrat's interests because it is exclusively their bill.

This thing is doomed to fail and we'll be damned lucky if it's stillborn.

[thundley4]

Stillborn or aborted?  This is one time that I would whole heartedly support that procedure.

[DumbAss Tanker]

The Democrats have gut-level-appeal rhetoric because they try to make everything class war, race war, good guys/bad guys. Conservatives generally realize things are really a whole Hell of a lot more complicated than that, but reality doesn't make for good ringing phrases and sound bites. 

I don't count idiots like the far-Right fringe as Conservatives in that, any more than nihilists, anarchists, and other Left-wing fartbrains represent Democrats.  Though, of course, there are some of them on DU who think they are Democrats, whether their own party really wants them or not.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Stillborn or aborted?  This is one time that I would whole heartedly support that procedure.

Either way it's a win for us. The only question is how much pain will we have to endure to win.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

I don't count idiots like the far-Right fringe as Conservatives in that, any more than nihilists, ...

Hey now!

I'm a nihilists...reformed...second synod.

[thundley4]

Either way it's a win for us. The only question is how much pain will we have to endure to win.

Any pain from it's defeat is going to be less than the pain of it's passage an implementation. If this went through, and then some form of Cap&Tax went through, this economy would be done.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Any pain from it's defeat is going to be less than the pain of it's passage an implementation. If this went through, and then some form of Cap&Tax went through, this economy would be done.

It'd take 2 generations to climb back up but we'd recover.

It's America after all. We may not be smart but we are a bunch of resilient quasi-barbarians.

[BadCat]

It'd take 2 generations to climb back up but we'd recover.

It's America after all. We may not be smart but we are a bunch of resilient quasi-barbarians.

We were.
Not anymore.

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

We were.
Not anymore.

We were pretty beat down by ruinous socialist economic policies when we were dragged into WW2. We stood up then.

We recovered from the LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter series of flusterclucks well enough to set the USSR into a death spiral inside of 2 presidential terms.

Giving up is for welfare candy-asses.

You ain't that.