Obama pays price of timidity

Opinion: September 27, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Bogdan Kipling

McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In cobbling together the broad-based coalition that rammed health reform though Congress earlier this year, President Barack Obama and his advisers ignored the sage of advice of an old Indian proverb.

“When you invite the Tiger to dinner, always remember that the Tiger gets to decide what’s on the menu!”

Big Insurance and Big Pharma — the two greediest and most parasitical players in America’s healthcare sector — cynically spent millions on ad campaigns supporting ObamaCare because they realized they would reap billions of dollars on the fuller coverage mandated by the omnibus package.

Gone with the wind are their protestations of undying trust in the free market system; leave such twaddle to the hard-working doctors and nurses who toil long and hard — and, yes, often for too little-pay — to actually deliver high-quality healthcare to the American people.

In making cause with Big Insurance and Big Pharma, Obama betrayed the progressives who were his base constituency and destroyed the longstanding dream of a rational, single-payer government-run medical system similar to those in Canada and most of Europe.

Already a number of major U.S. insurers — Aetna and BlueCross BlueShield among them — are announcing increases of more than nine percent and blaming it on provisions contained in ObamaCare.

Surely this is an act of clairvoyance that exceeds that of the Amazing Kreskin, since most of the act’s mandates don’t take effect for several years and federal bureaucrats are still puzzling over how to craft regulations for the ones that do.

By engaging with the private insurers against the advice of such past Democratic legends as FDR and Harry Truman, Obama has assured himself even more insurance price hikes in the near future.

And he also has assured that American dinnertime TV viewers will have the benefit of a new onslaught of ads touting innovative pharmaceutical products for conditions they never realized they had.

Victory into defeat

In the meantime, Democratic congressional candidates — seemingly masters of all they surveyed less than two years ago — now are in full and panicked retreat.

Republicans — like so many opportunistic Cossacks — will fall on the laggards with a vengeance on Nov. 2. Even with a few bizarre tea-partiers in its ranks, the GOP is a good bet to recapture the House of Representatives and come close enough in the Senate to derail spending appropriations for ObamaCare’s major provisions.

Had the Democrats merely listened to the wise counsel of such progressives as Reps. Jim McDermott, D-WA, and Texas maverick Jim Hightower and pressed for single-payer while they had a staggering majority they likely could have avoided all of this.

From a Canadian perspective, they might be far happier if they had. Yes, the Canadian system has some major flaws, but most of the country’s 34-million inhabitants seem relatively happy with it. It provides all the necessities, but few of the expensive frills of the American system.

Then again most Canadians are hardy enough souls that they have no desire to cling to a life that is not really living. What could be more horrendous than to be kept alive for a few more months by excruciatingly painful operations that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?

When it comes to prolonging life beyond its normal range, Americans might do well to remember Shakespeare’s immortal lines in Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

Bogdan Kipling is a veteran Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.