Less a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one

President Obama and his Democratic Congress have made history, only not the kind they have in mind. They have become the only president and Congress to enact a leviathan social program altering the life of every American -- against the wishes of those American people, over the threatened opposition of three-fourths of the state legislatures, with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition, and by arcane parliamentary maneuver.
　
When it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform."
　
A month after the Massachusetts comeuppance, the CNN poll found just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether. And yet within a month of that, House Democrats voted to make the 2,700-page Senate bill the law of the land, and passed a "reconciliation" bill which actually builds on the Senate monstrosity and annexes the entirety of the student loan system to the federal government while they're at it.
　
Three days before the House vote, Obama's job approval rating went net negative in the Gallup poll for the first time, and Congress' approval hit 16 percent, just two points up from the lowest recorded in 36 years of Gallup polling on the question. The day before the vote, the Rasmussen poll of likely voters put Obama's job approval rating at 43 percent; it took five years for George W. Bush to fall so low.

By the time the House vote was called, 38 of the 50 state legislatures had indicated an intent to challenge the new law. And on the day of the vote, the only bipartisanship was in opposition to the new law: 34 House Democrats joined every Republican in voting "nay."

That looks less like a "historic victory" than a Pyrrhic one.
　
The undeniable good that is done by this "reform" could have been written up in a relative few pages and passed with wide margins and popular support the best part of a year ago, and the legitimate, hard-case uninsured could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the 80 percent who call themselves satisfied with their health-care as-is. This "comprehensive health-care reform" is something quite apart from help for folks who've fallen through the cracks and a curbing of the odd insurance industry abuse.
　
Obama's own chief actuary for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."
　
The Congressional Budget Office ruled the Senate bill would drive the cost of health-insurance premiums "10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than...under current law," that it would lead employers to dump 5 million Americans net from their current coverage, and that even a decade after passage, it would leave 16 million Americans uninsured still, plus 8 million uninsured illegals.
　
The new law includes something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy federally-approved, comprehensive health-insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.
　
The new law establishes 159 new bureaucracies of all sorts, and hires 16,500 new IRS agents to police the new regime of taxes, regulations, and mandates.
　
The new law is supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.
　
And nowhere in those thousands of pages is there any attempt at the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health-insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

House Democrats passed the Senate bill only on the understanding that their "reconciliation" bill would then be passed in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold, which is without precedent for legislation of this nature and scale, and which is the sort of thing Obama and his party denounced as affront to American democracy until they came to see it as a neat trick for getting their way.
　
It's not until 2014 and later that the new law goes fully into effect; there will be national elections this November and in November of 2012. By having it all their own way, against the national will and around the legislative rules, Obama and his Congress have only hastened the day when a very different government sits in Washington. The Left in America may never be entrusted with such unchecked power again for a generation.

--A slightly earlier version of this published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia