The Obama administration has developed a health care financing reform package that is

designed to front load costs to the nation, to consumers and to providers of health care
services while back loading the benefits patients. By this I mean the costs, both financial
costs and costs in terms of loss of access to health care coverage, will be felt more or less
immediately while the full benefits to these groups will not occur for at least four years.

Front loading costs and back loading benefits is something that is only done, in normal
legislative processes, when you raise taxes, which this package will do. It will raise taxes
directly on those making more than $250,000 per year. Beyond that, it will raise health
care costs on almost everybody, eliminate coverage, in the short term, for tens of millions
and will do so almost immediately.

It does this without imposing any real competition in the market place, making an
efficient market, always improbable in health care finance, almost impossible. Not only
does it not offer a public option for health insurance, it doesn't do anything of
significance to increase competition from other potential private sector providers.

It does give further economic advantages to the narrow cabal of health insurance
providers. By doing so, it virtually assures these companies of an even larger percentage
take from health care costs without their having to do anything of value to earn it.

I have read that there may be a last minute insertion of a public option plan into the bill. I
have read that this may take the form of allowing individuals to enroll in MediCare
without regard to the person's age. If this is so, it would make a real difference in my
opinion of the bill. However, I have also read that this is not so and that the votes to get
this done, even if it were to be attempted, are not there.

If the new law stays as it is currently proposed, I believe I am watching the suicide of the
Democratic Party. The idea that the President and the Democratic controlled Congress
would sell out the American people to the band of vultures and parasites that comprise
the health insurance industry is unthinkable. It is unthinkable because the President, and
the Congress, ran on the promise that they would fix the health care finance mess. For
them to be so callously deceitful, by trying to foist this cynical mess on to us, speaks
more eloquently than anything else they could say about the disrespect they feel for us
and derision and contempt they hold for us.

All that is very bad. However, what is far worse is the foolishness of it. People don't
particularly mind being led by scoundrels as long as the scoundrels are reasonably
intelligent about things. The President and his Congress do not appear to be very artful or
intelligent in the manner of their approach.

This bill is very bad in its opening years. The argument for it, that it somehow will be
worth the suffering if we just all hang on until the end of the fourth year of its
implementation, is specious. It is so bad in the opening years there will be no full
implementation.
All the opposition to government involvement to health care financing has to do now is
come up with something only slightly better than the horrid mess Obama has given us
(assuming it passes). Using a combination of tax incentives and legal adjustments, it will
not be hard to develop a "private sector" alternative that will be so much more attractive,
especially in the initial years, than the proposed legislation. Democrats that survive the
fall election will happily support a "market" alternative.

I am very sad to see this happen. I believe passing this law and claiming it means real
health care finance reform will break the centuries old bond between the American
people and the Democratic Party. The party is the oldest continuously operated political
party in the world. Maybe it has lived so long it cannot remember that it is better to lose
while standing for something than it is to pass something just so you can claim a victory.

It is said that failure to pass something that can be called health care reform, even if it is
crap, will mean the end of the Obama Presidency. If what we have seen so far of Obama's
leadership is what we can look forward to, the end of it cannot come soon enough.