EVEN THE KANAMITS WERE QUITE POPULAR…FOR AWHILE

3/17/10

As I think about the health insurance bill that looks like it is about to pass this week, by hook or by crook, I am starting to think that the Republicans might rue the day they so vociferously opposed this bill.

The first impact (I would say the “immediate” impact, but it’s going to take a few years before the features of the bill fully take effect.) will be that a lot of people who couldn’t get health insurance due to preexisting conditions will be able to get health insurance. A lot of people who couldn’t afford health insurance will be able to afford health insurance due to a combination of generous subsidies and enormous pressure, mostly political but, hopefully, also economic, on health insurance companies.

Sure, the aforementioned, and other, benefits of the bill will come about because of coercion. In all likelihood, the long run costs of the bill, and not only dollar costs, will be high and may include an impairment of the efficient delivery of health services and the further technological development of the industry. Moreover, in the all not that long run, the bill will put enormous pressure on a federal budget, and state budgets, already strained beyond the breaking point. But, in the short run, a lot of people will see a lot of benefits from the bill. And, since most people don’t have a grasp on the long run, they will wind up quite pleased with the bill. Then the Republicans will have to explain why they told everyone that the bill would be the ruination of our budget, our economy, and our society, a harbinger of the socialization, they continually tell us, rightly or wrongly, that President Obama has planned for the economy.

To a lot of people, this bill is going to look pretty good, for awhile. When the horror stories that the GOP has concocted don’t come true, Mr. Obama, and the Democrats, may end up looking better for 2010 and 2012 than many people expect, at least on a relative basis.

Doubtless some GOP loyalists will argue that the Republicans, by opposing a bill that might prove popular in the short run and fiscally ruinous in the long run, are showing their “fiscal responsibility” and their “concern for the future of our nation.” Those arguments, however, went out the window George W. Bush and the GOPers who played the lap dog to him, who showed that they cared not a whit for either fiscal responsibility or the future. Rare is the politician of either party who is able to see, or cares what happens, beyond the next election.

Additional note…

Does anyone get this latest of what my students call my OGCRs (“Old Geezer Cultural References”) in the title to this post?