Scoring An Error

by digby

Observing major legislation like health care is confusing even if you are able to see it close up, which most of us aren’t. It’s looks less like a chess game and more like little kids playing tag on the playground. There’s lots of energy and lots of shrieking but nobody knows how the game is going to end.

This news about the CBO scoring of the health plan is bad news. It’s not because it has any bearing on reality.(Here’s Ezra explaining that it is more a matter of bad communication than bad numbers.) The reason it’s a problem is because the opponents of reform will demagogue the hell out of it and help shift the debate from need to cost, which fits exactly with their plan. This was a big error. They are printing up the bumper stickers as we speak and there won’t be a wingnut in the land who won’t be robotically repeating the company line by the end of the day.

Allowing the congress to take the lead on this was understandable. But it’s possible that they have, as politicians and generals are wont to do, over learned the lessons of the past. Allowing the dysfunctional congress to run this initiative was probably a mistake. The Democrats have not yet figured out how to lead and their strategic and rhetorical skills are lame, to say the least. Something this big needs at least some direction and I don’t see it. At this point, I would have to guess that the fiscal scolds have the better case.

One of the sadly ironic things about health care reform is that because we have an employer based system, unless we reach a critical mass of people being out of work or worried about being out of work, there is usually not enough political energy for taking on the massive Medical Industrial Complex. But that happens at the exact moment when the government is losing tax revenues and the fiscal scolds can jump in on behalf of the plutocrats and aristocrats and demagogue deficits. It’s a problem. But it’s not one that shouldn’t have been anticipated. Any discussion of costs should have been very, very carefully dealt with and it doesn’t look as though that happened here.

All isn’t lost of course. This is still early in the game. But the advocates of health care reform just handed the industry a powerful weapon for no good reason.

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