Clintoncare '94, Obamacare '09

The U.S. Census Bureau reports today that 15.4 percent of Americans lack health coverage. Do you know what the percentage was in 1995, the year after Clintoncare collapsed in September '93?

15.4 percent.

That's a concern, but that's not a crisis. Well, it is a crisis if you are one of the uninsured, and I don't mean to minimize that. But my point is that we shouldn't be stampeded by a false sense of urgency into doing something foolish with the health care overhaul. I found this reaction to the Obama speech by Dr. David Gratzer to be pretty interesting, in that he says that Obamacare is a repeat of Clintoncare.

Well, I found some interesting stuff poking around in the New York Times archive this afternoon. For one, here's a transcript of the big health care speech President Clinton delivered to Congress in 1993. It will sound awfully familiar to we who watched President Obama on TV last night. Then, after digging some more, I found this huge NYT autopsy of the death of Clintoncare, trying to figure out why and how it went down. There's some excellent stuff here that's quite relevant to today's debate. Excerpt:

Bob Blendon, a public opinion scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health, said of the Administration: "They misread the mandate, read it much too broadly. Since people are very cynical about government and the President only had 43 percent of the vote, they wanted reform, but they wanted something easy to understand, something that did not look as threatening as the Clinton plan. The Clinton White House read it as much too broad in terms of trust in President and Mrs. Clinton."

Obama, of course, won a majority of the vote, unlike Clinton in his first term. But Clinton had nothing like the economic crash to deal with, as Obama has had. That is, public confidence in government, and in the future, has been badly shaken by things out of Obama's control. How do you ask the American people to accept a huge expansion of government power, and a big new entitlement, when you've already asked them to accept so much government indebtedness to bail out the economy? It seems that Obama is headed for the same kind of overreach that Clinton did.

There's more:

This was enough for a Presidential campaign; Mr. Clinton enjoyed the benefits of being for health care reform without the downside of explaining how, exactly, it would be paid for, without the Congressional Budget Office passing judgment on his financing, without a fully engaged debate on all the contentious specifics of remaking the health care system. But without that debate, the Clinton forces may have made a dangerous miscalculation. They came away with a clear conviction that the public was sending a message in this campaign: do something big about health care.

But were they?

Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who also works for the Health Insurance Association of America, said on Saturday, "People overread the data in 1992. Almost half of Americans said they wanted a radical change in the health care system, but in Washington that was interpreted to mean something these people did not mean."

Mr. McInturff said that when he followed up in focus groups, asking people exactly what they meant by radical change, "they said: 'if I lose my job, I don't want to lose my coverage. I don't want it to cost so much.' "

The pollster added: "What they were really talking about was portability. So what in Washington was considered incremental change, was to people out in the country radical."

Similarly today, I have no trouble imagining that people want the health care system to change, to give them more security. I want that; don't you? But could we get something not perfect, but good enough, through incremental reform -- insurance reform, say? It's not a final destination, perhaps, but it would be something more prudent in light of the economic situation?

Frankly, I have very serious doubts about the president's credibility regarding the cost of his proposal. At Reason, Ronald Bailey cited the example of how LBJ deliberately concealed the projected costs of Medicare because he knew it would have to be lowballed to get it passed. Now, even though Medicare is going to push the country toward bankruptcy within a decade or two absent serious reform, it is politically untouchable (thanks, old people). And so too will whatever new entitlement comes out of this current debate.

Look, I like the president a lot -- and the Republicans, as I've repeatedly said here, are pretty nauseating these days. Nevertheless, whether or not I like the Republicans or Obama, this is a huge thing he's asking us to do -- and a vast amount of financial commitment he's asking us to take on. I will be watching the debate unfold in Congress with skeptical eyes.