Here is our health care strategy: defeat, defund, repeal, replace.
1. Defeat. Republicans must use the time between now and Election Day to highlight every negative health care-related happening, as well as the Democrats' ham-fisted response. The beauty of health care reform is that now the Democrats own the system and everything that goes wrong is their fault. Let's use this terrific advantage. This effort should start with the announcements by Verizon, Caterpillar, John Deere, 3M, and others that health care reform will cause them to incur major expenses and will likely result in increasing costs and contracting benefits. We must yell loudly and often about Waxman's attempt to extort and blackmail these companies by forcing them to appear before his committee and release private and confidential documents, including e-mail, all because they're telling the truth (and following IRS regulations) instead of toeing his party's line. And when the announcements of 2011 premium increases begin in the fall, we must insistently pin the blame on the Democrats. Would increases have happened anyway? Sure. Is it fair? Perhaps not. But no more unfair than the numerous lies, distortions, and smears Democrats have used to defeat our policies and enact theirs. The only way to oppose Saul Alinsky is to become Saul Alinsky. If we are successful, this should result in Republican majorities in one or both Houses of Congress, or failing that at least large enough minorities to prevent the Democrats from wreaking any more havoc on the country.
2. Defund. Outright repeal is not the only way to fight the health care bill. One of the rules of Washington is, "you can agree to any notional future option, in principle, but fight implementation every step of the way." If we control at least one House of Congress, we can insert language into the appropriations bills preventing HHS from spending any appropriated funds to implement provisions of the health care bill. Will Obamao risk a government shutdown by vetoing this, knowing that the bill is unpopular and he's coming up for re-election? Unlikely. And if he does, so much the better--it will only serve to further convince the public that he's a radical who must be turned out of office.
3. When we win control of both Houses and the White House in 2012, we must move immediately to repeal the bill. It is, as Yuval Levan puts it, "a badly misguided technocratic pipe dream...degraded into ruinous incoherence by the madcap process of its enactment." Despite decades of proof that top-down regulation by government is not an effective method of service delivery or cost control, it relies on exactly that mechanism. It is beyond redemption.
4. Replace. This is the most important component of the strategy. In part, we must blame ourselves for this debacle: after 1994, we simply congratulated ourselves on our great victory over Hillarycare and did nothing to fix a health care system that we knew was broken and unsustainable. We cannot repeat this mistake. As the Democrats have pointed out, some provisions of this bill are popular, and if we try to repeal them, we will find ourselves in the same doghouse they now occupy. We must look to Whole Foods and Healthy Indiana for a model that can supply basic health insurance to all Americans at an affordable cost while actually bending down the cost curve, as Obamaocare promises but fails to deliver.
The Democrats' claim to have resolved the health care issue once and for all is specious because more than half the country hasn't signed on and the other major party is devoted to its repeal. In fact, they have created a bipartisan majority: in opposition to their plan. We must use this bipartisan majority to enact a truly permanent solution that will finally turn the tide on the New Deal-based welfare state and create a safety net based on competition and free enterprise rather than government bureaucrats and regulations.
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