Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post today:
So Obama hasn’t strayed far from Karl Rove’s playbook for routing the opposition. But surely, you say, he’s planning nothing as divisive or as risky as the Iraq war? Well, that’s where the health-care plan comes in: a $634 billion (to begin) “historic commitment,” as Obama calls it, that (like the removal of Saddam Hussein) has lurked in the background of the national agenda for years. We know from the Clinton administration that any attempt to create a national health-care system will touch off an enormous domestic battle, inside and outside Congress. If anything, Obama has raised the stakes by proposing no funding source other than higher taxes on wealthy Americans, allowing Republicans to raise the cries of “socialism” and “class warfare.”
The Iraq war will cost as much as $3 trillion, so about five times as much as Obama’s health care plan. Bush brought the country to war with Iraq under false pretenses, by suggesting a connection with Al Qaeda and claiming there were WMD, whereas the health care crisis — specifically the fact that about 50 million Americans do not have health insurance — is chronically underestimated, probably because most reporters do have health insurance.
This may be the dumbest comparison I have ever read anywhere.
valdivia
The comparisons of Obama and Bush continue until they become ridiculous. War and health care are the same! Lying about WMD to get us into the war is the same as….. Oh right, no one is lying about the very real health care crisis.
Dennis-SGMM
Obama made them do it so they did – right after they got Limbaugh’s permission to do so.
Loren
I agree, comparing War and Healthcare is apples and oranges.
$634 billion for healthcare is a VERY low estimate of costs…I would be willing to bet that single payer healthcare in the United States will top 3 Trillion dollars easily. Look what the inital cost estimates were for the Perscription Drug Benefit, and what it is costing.
Keep up the great work on the website. I enjoy your posts!
J.D. Rhoades
One of the really ironic things about Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure is that it’s so expensive that we’ve been handed an instant response to any Republican who complains about the cost of any proposed program: "your trumped up war cost more and you never said a mumblin’ word about that."
jwb
I think the conservatives must believe that the only way they are going to get back into the game is by convincing We, the People that Bush=Obama=liberal.
Comrade Jake
The lost opportunity costs associated with the Iraq war really are staggering.
MikeJ
Didja catch the bit about how Obama is demonizing the GOP by saying they "believe that we should do nothing" about the economy? Of course that’s precisely what they suggest, but Obama is Bushian by repeating their words.
valdivia
And my favorite is that the Republicans are now indulging Obama by declaring we should have a spending freeze to help with the crisis. Are these people idiots or what?
Comrade Jake
@valdivia:
"It’s almost like these people take pride in being ignorant."
camchuck
If only the Democrats had pushed back against the Iraq war a fraction of the amount the GOP will fight health care…
bob h
Not to mention that Obama’s plan is paid for.
valdivia
@Comrade Jake:
indeed. They do.
kay
@Loren:
You’re ignoring return. There’s a return on the investment in reforming health care. That’s why everyone agrees it needs to be reformed. It doesn’t work. It costs too much. It covers too few. It makes us less competitive as a country. It doesn’t work even for those who have health insurance.
Are pundits really going to discuss health care reform solely as a cost? They’re really going to pretend that there is no return?
Why do they think we’re going to all this trouble?
kay
I’m flabbergasted by the comparison. We were spending X amount flying over Iraq and periodically bombing Iraq. Then we invaded Iraq and occupied it, and spent more.
We already spend trillions on health care. It goes up every year, regardless of outcome.
We’re already spending trillions on health care. We’re now going to pretend Obama is going from zero cost to hundreds of millions? It costs now. We pay now.
RSA
Not to mention that the majority of the American public is in favor of a revamping of our health system. Invading Iraq? That took a bit of "persuasion".
ronathan richardson
I want to talk to someone who’s undergone the hiring process to become a mainstream journalist or commentator recently, because it seems like there are absolutely no standards for rationality or truth anymore. Comparing bringing healthcare to the bottom 50% of America to invading a sovereign nation based on lies and killing 250,000 people while making 2.5 million refugees…That would get a failing grade in a 4th grade class.
The Grand Panjandrum
The establishment media doesn’t get it. Until it happens to someone close to them. Ask Karen Tumulty.
Most the Villagers have lived inside the bubble for so long it takes a near catastrophic event for them to be snapped back to planet Earth. (Dare I say, Real America?) The cavalier attitude that seems to drip from most of the pens of these know-it-alls can be quite tedious, and mostly certainly, infuriating. I give her credit for admitting that her so-called "expertise" was insufficient to handle one crisis in her family. Just imagine a system with hundreds of thousands of these rotten outcomes. Now the picture of our healthcare nightmare comes into focus, and the hideous image is almost unbearable to set ones gaze upon.
Richard Stanczak
It is possible to imagine that there are ‘journalists’ and pundits that are individually stupid, self centered, and corrupt enough to spew such misinformation but my question would be where is this clown’s editor?
I’m no expert on the process of how a story becomes published but I always assumed that the editors provided some kind of reality check. Are they just glorified spell checkers?
I can also believe that the top of the food chain pundits [Will, Brooks, Kristol, Freidman, Broder, Krauthammer, Dowd] would never have the content of their challenged for factual accuracy or plain logic.
Time to kick these lying sycophants to the side of the road.
El Cid
Diehl is a repulsive, lying ass.
He’s that worst of the worst creature of the newspaper world, the one who consciously lies in order to rewrite reality as he prefers.
Usually it’s on foreign policy issues.
Warren Terra
Another important point is that Candidate Bush ran advocating "a humble foreign policy" and denouncing Nation Building, while Candidate Obama consistently and forcefully called for healthcare reform, and providing universal access to health care was one of Candidate Obama’s main policies in his stump speeches and one that he stressed in the October debates.
joe from Lowell
Remember when George Bush invited Democratic leaders to an Iraq Disarmament Summit, and declared that no ideas for solving the problem were off the table?
Me neither.
Ryan
And like all wars, the Iraq adventure had the explicit goal of killing people and fucking up infrastructure.
So far Obama has framed his health reform package as having something to do with saving lives and strengthening infrastructure.
Garrigus Carraig
The war killed tens of thousands of innocent people. Improved health care coverage will not. So that’s another way they’re different. Just sayin’.
Warren Terra
Moderate Voice, given that Obama remains popular, if Limbaugh’s audience is "exploding" it would suggest that those people who dom’t like Obama, in other words the Republican Base, are now more likely to listen to Limbaugh – not that there are more of them. That’s pretty predictable (partisan media, and especially unaccountable populist partisan media, always does better in opposition), and it offers little or no sign that Obama’s in trouble. Indeed, to the extent that the Republican Base clings more tightly to extremist viewpoints and denounces Moderation from their own party, they are less likely to reach out to the center and to actually worry Obama.
J sub D
The last time the federal government over-estimated the eventual costs of a major program was …? I’ll need a little help to finish that sentence.
If Obama wished to be honest, he would say that heath care reform that covers those "50 million Americans" is going to cost multiple terabucks. While politicians low-balling estimates in order to get programs passed is nothing new (see Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit and the Iraq fuck story for recent examples), I thought that all of this CHANGE© was going to include honest accounting.
Apparently I was wrong. Politics as usual.
J sub D
BTW, very nice looking site here. Some site designers deserve gold stars. Or just plain gold.
Beej
Yeah, the Iraq war and healthcare are exactly alike. Except that the Iraq war has killed how many thousands? And revamping healthcare coverage is intended to see to it that fewer die. Except for that they’re the same thing.
jcricket
@Warren Terra: The guys at Moderate Voice are almost always the worst kinds of moderates – Slate/Broder-esque "pick between both sides as a virtue" types. It’s pathetic, and I stopped reading them a while ago because it’s nothing more than Villager-talk.
You want to know where the "middle" is? Barack Obama. In any other country he’d be in the center, maybe even center-right. But here we discuss the average Democrat as if they’re actually leftists. For heaven’s sake – Kucinich and Feingold would be considered pretty typical liberals in most countries, not far-out-there leftist loons.
So I’m done thinking that listening to those that want "moderation" between Democrats and Republicans is some kind of intelligent political advice or virtuous exercise. We’ve got real problems to solve and there’s only one side right now actually engaged in that effort.
Take health care for example. One side is busy creating false analogies, fear-mongering, using scare tactics or, at best, proposing ridiculous non-options like McCain’s "let’s deregulate everyting and the free market will make healthcare universally affordable and useful".
The Democrats, on the other hand, offer various working models like single-payer, mixed public/private with regulation, etc. And Democratsoffering a real way to pay for this (even if the funding source isn’t "perfect").
At this point all Republicans are about as credible as "birthers" on most issues and should be treated as such.
skippy
most repubbbs are "birthers," or at least "flat earther/6,000 year old creationists," or at the very least, "complete no-regs necessary for mankind to live in prosperity" libertarians.
in otherwords, non-realityists.
Chris
My god, but Jackson Diehl is one stupid motherfucker.
Nothing Democrats do can prevent Republicans from exercising the urge to raise the cries of socialism and class warfare. If there was a twelve-step program for stupid, perhaps Jackson Diehl might figure that out.
(Hint: it’s because Democrats cannot control what Republicans choose to do, despite Republicans crocodile-tear/concern-troll bitching about how much they want to vote for and support Democratic programs and priorities, but those mean ol’ liberals keep calling them names, so they have to vote against healthcare for poor kids, tax cuts for the middle class, benefits for veterans, etc.)
CalD
If Obama was really taking a page from Rove’s playbook he’d be floating cost projections that are 1/50th of the likely cost of the endeavor (remember when Irag was only going to cost us $40 – 60 billion?), predicting a cakewalk and calling anyone who suggested it might not be that cheap or easy un-American, perhaps French. Would you like Healthcare Fries with that?