Over the weekend, President Trump gave his weekly YouTube address, using the platform to bash Obamacare: “Millions of families across our nation are suffering under the disaster known as Obamacare. . . . Democrats in Congress created this calamity and now, if we don’t act, millions more Americans will be hurt by Obamacare’s deepening death spiral.”
Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders (I.,Vt.) appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press. “When you throw 23 million people off of health insurance, people with cancer, people with diabetes, thousands of people will die,” he explained. “I wish I didn’t have to say it. This is not me. . . . It is common sense.”
Then there was Governor John Kasich (R., Ohio), who seized the moral high ground while appearing on CNN’s State of the Union: “I think there are too many people that cower in the wings because of partisanship, not just Republicans, Democrats as well. . . . I’m worried about poor people. You know what? Both parties, both parties ought to be worried about poor people, because I don’t think either party particularly cares about helping poor people.”
If you read these three major political figures arguing with one another, you could be forgiven for believing they’d stumbled onto a serious policy conflict. Clearly, major issues are at stake. Aren’t they?
Not really. President Trump wants to re-enshrine Obamacare’s two central premises: that it is the government’s job to make sure everyone has health insurance, and that health-insurance companies should therefore be forced to cover preexisting conditions. Sanders wants to spend more money on the same two principles — or do away with the second principle altogether in favor of a direct government program. Kasich expanded Obamacare in his own state, saying that St. Peter would want government health-care spending expanded, and he mirrors both Trump and Obama in his central contention that there is a government-guaranteed “right” to health insurance.
What are these three fighting over? Whether to spend an insane amount of money on Medicaid or simply a crazy amount of money on Medicaid; whether to pay for everyone’s insurance through taxes later or today; whether to force insurance companies to cover services that are unnecessary or allow them to pare such services back to a moderate extent; whether to mandate that healthy people buy health insurance or whether to coax them into gradual single-payer acceptance via back-door fines. All of this matters, of course. But to suggest that this is a cataclysmic conflict over principles is idiotic. Democrats and Republicans apparently agree on health care’s central principles, they just argue over how best to implement them.
And yet the passions run high.
Government has become a faculty lounge: Never have so many fought so hard and so viciously over so little.