Republican failure to repeal the "A"CA - first thoughts

A lot of layers of lessons here.

I'll start with a lesson that applies to a number of other issues, particularly how to deal with rogue states' nuclear ambitions. I've said before that the reason we're in such a pickle regarding North Korea and Iran is that no one mustered the foresight decades ago to take requisite preventive measures.  This applies to the health care situation as well. Full-throated defenses of a free-market approach should have been coming from every Republican legislator in both houses of Congress in the early 1990s in response to Hillary Clinton's attempt to steer policy toward a collectivist bias. I put a fair amount of the blame in Bush 43, who readily signed on to the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs. Collectivists, including then-presidential candidate Obama, held the megaphone, since arguments in favor of liberty, choice and competition were relegated to the op-ed pages and some wonky journals. As with the line rogue regimes eventually cross (they become nuclear powers, and there's no going back), once this degree of government involvement in health care became law and got a few years of application under its belt, turnaround faded to the status of an improbability.

Another level it behooves us to look at is the aforementioned wonkery. I'm all for everyone and anyone being as knowledgeable as possible, certainly about the details of health care. And I acknowledge that, regarding health care, that's a pretty daunting task. Everybody concedes that health care policy gets complicated real fast.

But why?

That is not really so complex. The progressive mindset that started infecting American thought just about a century ago - the idea that modern, urban, industrialized life had become too complicated to be addressed by the Constitution and required a battery of specialists and experts in various fields to staff executive-branch agencies to regulate various aspects of life - flourished to the degree that FDR's ridiculous 1944 "second bill of rights," asserting such impossibilities as freedom from want, a guarantee of a job, and, yes, guarantee of health care, found a disturbingly large applauding segment of the public. Then of course came 1965 and the two major programs which have sprawled and grown more insolvent every day since their enactment: Medicare and Medicaid.

So the idea that government was supposed to "do things for us" and "provide services" came to be seen as innocuous and as self-evident as the actual governmental function of keeping us safe.

I'll say it again: freedom is elegantly simple. Government involvement in any aspect of life is the factor that complicates it.

It comes to change the thinking of private-sector players as well. Health insurance companies started talking to their customers in a markedly different way than those in the auto-insurance or home-insurance business, in which the monthly premium is clearly intended to mitigate the risk of unplanned occurrences.

Then there is the inexorable collapse of the "A"CA. Failure to repeal guarantees that millions of Americans will experience a moment of unprecedented shock at some point in the not-all-that-distant future, and waiting to fill the vacuum will be full-fledged socialism:

The bill for Obamacare’s unworkable financial scheme is already overdue, with health care companies fleeing the marketplace and that will leave 40 percent of the nation’s counties with only a single Obamacare-compliant insurer in 2018. Waiting in the wings for the moment of national health-care crisis is Bernie Sanders with Medicare for All, his euphemism for socialized medicine. At an estimated cost of $32 trillion over a decade, Bernie’s remedy would attempt to cure cancer with a draught of hemlock.

Then there is the question of why the Republican Party, even as it enjoys control of all three branches of the federal government and a majority of state governments, has shown that it is not the repository of the kind of clarity needed to provide a path back to freedom.

For that, I don't have a handy, paragraph-sized answer. I suppose a lot of it is all the factors involved in achieving political victory and just getting one's tail end to Washington: the fundraising, the kind of networking and schmoozing that must be undertaken, the risk of being vilified for speaking too plainly in a hostile media climate as society becomes more brittle.

It's a grim juncture at which we find ourselves, but there is no alternative to continuing to defend freedom. If it's foremost among one's values, one can't live with oneself if the only other voices in the national conversation food fight are championing tyranny and dehumanization.