I don’t believe I can do a better job than Charles Krauthammer explaining the failure of PlaceboCare. I’ll “borrow” the part where Krauthammer explains why the sum is worse than the parts:
Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.
However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?
Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry’s feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.
However, I do disagree that the body blow was how to pay for it. The Senate had before it, at a point when they needed absolutely no Republican support and no need for what Michelle Malkin has aptly called “Wreconciliation”, a bill that did everything the Left has ever wanted out of PlaceboCare but one “minor” detail – full federal funding for and a mandate on private insurance to provide abortion-on-demand. In order to get that into PlaceboCare, they sacrificed the official public “option” (with no real change in the cost), shifted a big part of the payment of the costs from “the rich” to businesses deemed to be too generous with their health-care plans, and threw in so much bribery that the House initially blanched at taking it up.
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