By David J. Sanders
You may have watched it. ABC News and President Barack Obama teamed up Wednesday night for a political infomercial — an Obama charm offensive — aimed at selling his health-care plan to the country.
In recent weeks, the president has gotten himself bogged down in the devilish details related to the actual costs of moving to his government-dominated plan. The White House surely thought the broadcast would reset the debate and return the initiative to Obama.
But it’s more likely that the ABC News/White House partnership may have had the opposite effect. Instead of inspiring confidence, Obama struggled at times to deal head on with some of the pointed questions asked by the panel of health-care professionals and citizens.
He thrashed about, trying to explain how his program would deal with cases in which life-saving care was required but not covered. He couldn’t provide definitive answers about how decisions related to end-of-life care would be made or who would ultimately make them.
He couldn’t explain how he would pay for his plan. He claimed the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate was wrong because it did not include efficiencies of a government-driven health-care plan.
When questioned about how the so-called public option would affect private insurers, Obama retreated. Instead, he argued the tired premise that something, rather than nothing, has to be done about health care.
He claimed he wanted more options on the table, but the president was never confronted with the fact that one of the major reasons private insurance is so expensive today is because private carriers are essentially forced to subsidize government health care’s limited reimbursements. That problem will be exacerbated if he insists that a public option be made available.
Moving forward, there are huge questions that remain, but President Obama isn’t ready to answer.
He argued that the American people should just trust him. Wednesday night he tried to make the case that we as a country know what to do about reforming health care and how to do it. For Obama, the only question that remains unanswered: Would our elected officials muster the political courage to do it?
If only it was that simple.
How do the 46 million Americans the Democrats claim are currently uninsured fare under the plan being debated in the U.S. Senate? Remember, the uninsured are those who Obama and the Democrats claim necessitate such a fundamental restructuring of the country’s health-care system.
The CBO’s cost estimate to the government of the Kennedy-Dodd Senate bill, if passed, is $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The plan would reshape the delivery of health care in the country, as the president intends, but not necessarily for the better. By 2019, it’s estimated that the plan would leave 37 million American without health insurance.
In a simple cost-benefit analysis — not taking into consideration what a new government system will cost the rest of us in terms of access and quality of care — how can anyone make a rational case for undertaking such a monumental restructuring when the outcome doesn’t have the desired effect of insuring the uninsured?
It’s obvious that what Mr. Obama is proposing is just a starting point. If we go in the direction he and the Democrats intend, they will come back in subsequent years, proposing trillions of dollars in new spending until all the uninsured are covered.
Mr. Obama claims that something has to be done about health care; fortunately that sentiment enjoys universal acceptance. But the terms of this debate are not, as he puts it, doing something vs. doing nothing. This debate is about doing the right thing vs. doing the wrong thing.
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David J. Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and is the host of Arkansas Education Television Network’s “Unconventional Wisdom.” His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com.
