The wide-sweeping health insurance reform that President Barack Obama has promised is finally on its way to being delivered, and the Editorial Board is not sure how to feel about it.
The proposed bill, which has just passed the Senate Health Committee (the first of six stages in its ascent to the Senate floor), calls for mandatory health insurance for all Americans and a government-run insurance program that will compete with private programs.
Sounds great. Then again, most things on QVC; those CutCo knives that everyone you went to high school with tries to sell to your parents as soon as you leave for college and Billy Mays' Awesome Auger (too soon?) always sounded great until we found out they cost like, 90 payments of $9.97 (Nickelodeon magazine, please!). Over the course of the next 10 years, the program would cost about a trillion dollars to implement. To us, and to everyone really, that cost is a little abstract. To write a million dots on sheets of paper would leave you with a room entirely full of paper. To do that with a trillion dots, you would fill up every room in Turlington.
Opponents of the bill will surely be quick to cry &lduo;socialized medicine" and to call, &lduo;There will be waiting lines!" with a Daniel Plainview level of fervor. These are not the problems that the Editorial Board is concerned about. Medicine in America is already rationed on very clear terms: People with money get a ration, people without money can't afford one.
Democrats are calling it an investment; Republicans are calling it an inappropriate expenditure. The bottom line is that neither party can predict how this will pan out. The Editorial Board does not claim to be more knowledgable than the senators who will either approve or deny the bill, and our psychic powers lie just below those of Miss Cleo and just above those of the mighty Alakazam (whose IQ is claimed to be 10,000, despite the fact that it can't escape a pokéball).
Obama is channeling Maynard Keynes with the assumption that stimulating the economy through an investment in infrastructure will pay off in the long run, and Republicans are complaining that we simply don't have the money to invest. Spending money inside the country as opposed to spending it in Iraq seems reasonable (but don't sue us, we aren't economics majors, and I think the median age that the Editorial Board stopped taking math at is around 15.3). But, note the word &lduo;assumption." This spending approach has not been tested. This is not FDR Redux. In fact this, could possibly be closer to &lduo;Apocalypse Now: Redux." There is no World War II waiting in the wings to give us the extra push. The potential horror, the potential horror.
Apart from the bill's possiblity of backfire, we recognize the need for health care reform. There are about 46 million Americans without health insurance. Medical care makes up about a fifth of our country's GDP. The majority of Americans say we need major health care reform this year, according to a Gallup poll. Basically, things are crazy. So while the Editorial Board is not ready to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to the 1000-page bill (and is certainly incapable of reading it, considering one of us has been reading &lduo;Ulysses" for three years), we laud Obama for at least making good on his word. We just hope that we don't have to be careful what we wished for.
