Christmas Nightmare

If legislating usually is like watching sausage being made, following the health care bills currently before Congress is like watching dog food be made — and being force fed to an unwilling public.

The only thing worse than the substance of the bill is the process in which it's being produced.

High-minded appeals to the moral imperative of passing health reform have given way to the crassest of political deal making. Democratic senators position themselves on the fence so they can negotiate a fair market price for their votes. Nebraska's Ben Nelson made a supposedly principled stand on restricting public funding of abortions — until he could secure a pledge that his state will receive full federal funding for Medicaid. Then his opposition to the bill melted like Frosty the Snowman in a hothouse. That has other lawmakers lining up to see what they can take away from the trough.

The public looks on with utter disgust. A RealClearPolitics.com average of nine different polls taken from Dec. 8-20 shows only 38.4 percent of Americans support the health bill, while 51 percent oppose it.

Regardless, legislation is being fast-tracked to a Christmas Eve vote, despite the fact that even many supporters of a greater government role in health care admit the House and Senate bills are deeply flawed and won't result in the kinds of positive changes they sought.

It won't control costs and be deficit neutral. Aside from being based on a contradiction in logic — adding more people to the health care system while mandating myriad coverages will simultaneously result in fewer net expenditures — the supposed "savings" in the bill are an accounting fiction.

Using budget gimmicks (taxes will be collected immediately, but benefits won't be paid out until 2014) and proposed cuts to Medicare spending that will never happen, lawmakers were able to torture the numbers until they confessed.

This approach is so bad, it actually would be better to do nothing. But that doesn't mean that nothing can or should be done. Indeed, there are plenty of alternatives to address failings in the status quo that aren't in this bill, such as allowing re-importation of pharmaceuticals, changing the tax code so it treats the self-insured the same as those whose employers insure them and permitting insurance to be sold across state lines.

If expanding access to health insurance is the goal, it would be more effective simply to cut checks to the uninsured and let them buy their own plans rather than erect an unbelievably complex system of federal regulations that will warp market incentives, thereby producing even more costly inefficiencies. And of course, that will elicit calls for even more government intervention down the road.

Indeed, this bull rush to pass something, anything before the holiday break resembles an Oklahoma land grab, with Sooners racing to stake their claims to a piece of earth. They'll figure out later what to build on it.

If Congress believes it has produced a Christmas gift to the American public, it's about as welcome as the pink bunny suit Ralphie is forced to wear in "A Christmas Story."

REPRINTED FROM THE PANAMA CITY NEWS HERALD.

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