Henninger: The President That Time Forgot
ObamaCare was a legislative monolith, out of sync with an iPad world.
Leaked
national security secrets may be a dime a dozen now, but the Supreme
Court still sits as the last major American institution that doesn't
conduct its business out the back door. Which is to say none of the
Supreme Court's nine justices called me to reveal their ObamaCare
decision before its Thursday annunciation. What difference does that
make? Anyone who had to wait for the Supreme Court to tell them what the
Affordable Care Act represents is too far behind the curve to ever
catch up. Alas, that includes Barack Obama, the president that time
forgot.
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ObamaCare was a legislative monolith, out of sync with an iPad world. Photo: Getty Images
Whether ObamaCare was affirmed or overturned
by the ladies and men in robes, nothing was going to change one
unimpeachable fact: From day one, the Obama health-care legislation was
swimming against the tides of history. It was a legislative monolith out
of sync with an iPad world. In the era of the smartphone, ObamaCare was
rotary-dial health reform.
The signs this was so were everywhere, but Barack Obama and the
Pelosi-Reid edition of the Democratic Party blew past them. Years before
it arrived at the Supreme Court's door, the Obama health-care law was
unpopular with the American public. With occasional exceptions, its
unfavorables have been above 50% for nearly three years. And why not? It
runs counter to the daily experience of virtually everyone.
Electronics, foods, fashion, entertainment, apps, social media,
appliances—pretty much anything that escapes the cold hands of a public
agency is laid before us in a dazzling, unprecedented array of choices.
Despite all the incoming, people learned to navigate the options.
Virtually everyone has become adept at customizing a personal milieu
that suits them. Given a reasonably growing economy, they'll be able to
sustain these choices.
In this context, the Affordable Care Act gave new meaning to the word
"outlier." Starting with the insurance mandate. Of course most people
hated it. They're living in a world turning more anti-mandate by the
minute, and the Democrats are ordering them all into a national
health-insurance pool.
Back in 2010, some Democrats talked like it was 1937 all over again.
They intoned how for 70 years they've wanted to enact a big national
health-care law. The Depression—those were the glory days. Or they said
ObamaCare's coverage-for-all would close the policy loop left open 45
years ago with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. So
naturally one pillar of the Obama health-care law was to push more
people into Medicaid's already faceless, frightening maw.
This is a Democratic Party whose
political survival now is yoked to monolithic public-employee unions
that themselves haven't allowed a new idea in 40 years. The teachers
unions persist in an irrational, immoral refusal to try other ways of
teaching inner-city kids.
Public-employee unions in California
are letting towns and cities—the latest is Stockton—slide over the
fiscal cliff. Since JFK, the Democrats have departed once from a
political one-size-must-fit-all, and that was the Clinton welfare
reform, which freed impoverished women to enter the private economy
inhabited by everyone else. That was it. The Republicans, to their
discredit, don't have an alternative to ObamaCare, but at least they're
not still building more Titanics.
Corbis
The Affordable Care Act is the exhibit
du jour, but there is a disconnect nearly everywhere between governments
and the reality of the way life is lived by the people they govern.
Across Europe, the young are being drowned by something known as "the
welfare state." It sounds more Orwellian than it did the first time.
Other than the crude imperatives of survival amid a modernizing people,
the Chinese Communist Party is clueless.
It remains astonishing that even now, the one American politician who
instinctively grasped that the standard model of 20th-century
government needed to adjust was Ronald Reagan. Barack Obama deployed the
new world of social media in 2008 to become president, and then
violated every new thing social media represents with a health-care law
whose central processing unit is the antiquarian Department of Health
and Human Services. He similarly nationalized student loans, forcing
college students to deal with the punch-card mainframes or whatever they
use at the U.S. Department of Education.
The public sector of its nature will always be behind the curve. But
does it have to be routinely out of it, as Washington is now? The
American people await a national politician or political party whose
public policies at least occupy the same universe that the electronic
tablet represents—real value that can be altered and upgraded to admit
new realities.
Over time, a health-care dinosaur like ObamaCare was likely to
implode under its own weight. It was inevitable that some future
Congress would be forced to allow the delivery of medicine to join the
rest of us in the 21st century. With or without the Supreme Court's
thoughts Thursday on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act,
that day lies in the future.
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