Lumps of coal for the U.S. Senate

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, was quoted as saying “It’s not always pretty, but Washington still has the capacity to deal with big problems,” presumably evidenced by the Senate’s passage of health care legislation this week. Not to rain on Mr. Pfeiffer’s parade, but the ‘big problem’ is precisely what the legislation potentially has wrought, not today, but 10 or 15 years down the road.

The latest approach to health care insurance reform presented a false choice – a legislative either/or – ginned up to conjure support among wavering moderates. The bills’ supporters reasoned that, since health care costs are the primary driver of federal budget deficits, let’s position the legislation as the sine qua non of fiscal responsibility; therefore, a vote for health care insurance reform is a vote for budget discipline. Such logic gave moderates enough political cover in order to cast their fateful votes, but there is a hole in this approach.

In essence, progressives are telling the rest of us that in order to save money over the long term, we have to spend money today. If only it were so easy. The cost savings associated with today’s legislation are years from being realized, and given the way legislation works in Washington, it is entirely possible that key components of the legislation will change between now and then, regardless of which party is in power. In fact, given lawmakers’ recent bent toward kleptocracy, this is practically a given. Over 2,000 pages of draft legislation and a decade’s worth of time give enterprising lobbyists plenty of opportunity to ruin a delicately balanced piece of legislation. It should go without saying that, if progressives were truly interested in cutting the costs associated with health care, they could have instituted changes years ago without adding 30 million people to the dole. One doesn’t require the other.

I have always been told that federal legislation is a knife, not a scalpel, and yet we have just passed a piece of legislation that requires precision and discipline over many years if it is not to become a bottomless money pit, and as we just witnessed during the Bush years, it doesn’t take an inept administration much time at all to well and truly screw the pooch. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel this legislation was and is a very, very bad idea, something that our children will curse and lament.