Federal Health Care Reform Still Doesn't Pencil Out

Stanley Greenberg's article in The New Republic nicely compares this year's health care reform debate to the failed (mercifully) 1993 effort. Greenberg, a close Clinton adviser and pollster, recounts how the Clinton plan foundered under unresolvable questions of cost and complexity.

Going back into the field, Greenberg posed again the questions he'd asked of voters sixteen years ago. And found that public opinion has changed little.

Our inability to talk credibly about how we would reduce health care spending or costs for individuals and the country built a contradiction into all our efforts--the more we talked about the comprehensiveness of our plans, the more voters worried this would yield higher premiums or higher taxes. Very quickly, voters came to conclude that their families would face higher costs.

And those dynamics are still in play. In my recent polling, I found that voters are skeptical about claims that reform will reduce costs and personal health outlays. Claims about simplicity, information-technology modernization, and best practices don't seem to be enough to persuade them otherwise.

He believes public resistance can be overcome. Read the article. It's going to take more than speeches and models to get past the reasoned resistance of consumers to increased government control.

Particularly when you look at numbers like these;

For the second time in less than two weeks, the independent and non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has dealt a crushing blow to President Barack Obama’s health care plans. First, on July 17th, CBO director Doug Elmendorf sent a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY), explaining that, in direct contradiction to President Obama’s promise that his health plan would not add even one dime to our deficit over the next decade, the House health plan would actually increase the budget deficit by $239 billion over ten years.

In Commentary, Jennifer Rubin clearly sums up the current problem for would-be reformers.

ObamaCare, far from reducing health-care costs and the deficit, increases them — dramatically and with no funding source identified to pay for the expansion. As Yuval Levin puts it: “This makes the ongoing<br>mad dash to find a way to make the bill look deficit neutral within a 10-year budget window seem silly.” We would in fact be setting off a time bomb within the already imploding federal budget.

So far, the countermove from the administration and Congressional leaders is to challenge the estimates. Good luck with that. Rasmussen Reports finds that just 23 percent of us believe health care costs will go down if reform passes Congress.