In the new Weekly Standard, my colleague Yuval Levin and I discuss the bill that has emerged from the Senate. An excerpt:
The [Democrats’ original] goal was to get a large swath of the public insured by the government, and so gradually create a socialized insurance system. Conservatives opposed this scheme because they believe a public insurer would not be able to introduce efficiencies that would lower prices. Liberals supported it because they think a public insurer would be more fair and more effective.
But in order to gain 60 votes in the Senate, the Democrats have now had to give up, for all practical purposes, on any version of that public insurer, while leaving the other components of their scheme in place. The result makes no sense whatsoever — not to conservatives, not to liberals, not to anyone. Rather than reform a system that everyone agrees is a failure, it will subsidize that system and compel participation in it — requiring all Americans to pay ever-growing premiums to private insurance companies, most of which are for-profit, while doing essentially nothing about the underlying causes of those rising costs. The thought that, after all of this, a Democratic Congress is going to force Americans to send their premiums to the despised insurance industry and then subsidize that industry to boot has sent the left into such a state of frenzied recriminations it could sink the whole enterprise yet.
And that is by no means the only problem for the left in this bill. The mad rush to pass something obscures a crucial component of the bill’s design that could prove very problematic for Democrats. For all of President Obama’s insistence that we must have action now, and all the talk by congressional Democrats about the terrible costs of delay, the key components of the Senate bill would actually not go into effect for four years. Essentially all of the spending provisions and insurance reforms — including the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, the employer mandate to provide it, the state insurance exchanges, the federal subsidies for coverage, and the Medicaid expansion — would only go into operation in 2014….
This timeline of tax and spending implementation corresponds rather awkwardly to the political calendar confronting the Democrats.
The entire article is available here.