Djelloul Marbrook

The health care debate might as well be conducted on the moon for all the reality it has failed to embrace.

On the one hand the Obama Administration has disastrously failed to explain its ideas. On the other hand, the insurance industry has mounted a massive disinformation campaign while assuring the White House it supports reform. By one count the industry has paid more than 50,000 people to raise a ruckus against health care reform.

Between vast ignorance on one side and disheartening miscommunication on the other, there seems little chance of enacting anything faintly resembling real reform. To make matters worse, the usually impeccable Congressional Budget Office seems to be muddying the debate by overestimating the cost of reform by using questionable formulas in its calculations.

And in the middle of this gulf is Afghanistan.

Even the most ardent health care reformers should be prepared to concede that the average American family looks at budgetary matters not as economists do but as families struggling to make ends meet do.

The average family reasons to itself that if it were supporting two kids with drug habits and ailing grandparents it could not afford a European vacation and probably could not even afford to hold on to its home. Why then should a government be able to conduct an endless war in Afghanistan and an endless police action in Iraq while at the same time incurring huge new health care costs?

And even as this admittedly hypothetical family asks itself this not-too-arcane question, the federal Office of Management and Budget raises its national debt estimate from $7.1 trillion to $9 trillion and says the recession is a lot deeper than it had first thought. Duh?

Isn’t it predictable that many Americans would respond by saying, Okay, that does it, we can’t afford this health care reform? To which the White House responds, By not reforming health care we will go deeper and deeper into debt.

I have no doubt the White House is right. Health insurance is crippling business. Health care is wildly inflationary and getting less effective by the day. But is it reasonable to think reform can be sold to Americans while we’re waging a war that has already contributed to our bankruptcy? A war to which no end can be foreseen, a war to which the Defense Department now wants to add troops?

Health care reform might be a reasonable objective if we were not bleeding massively in Afghanistan with precious little help from any other country. But as it is we are asking China to hold the bag for our ever-accelerating debt while we wage a dubious war on behalf of a people who do not like us much and wish we’d go home.

What part of this makes sense?

We can’t remove the bad guys in Myanmar or the bad guy in Venezuela. We can’t reform the world. We can’t police it. So the debate we should be having is about how much safer is our war in Afghanistan making us. Is it really the one and only way to counter Al Qaeda?

As matters stand, the Obama Administration, which theoretically controls our military, albeit not our military-industrial lobby, claims this war is essential to our future. Can this be believed any more than the 2004 Homeland Security alerts that Tom Ridge, then head of Homeland Security, now says were phony election ploys?

Americans know that when their wages fall, when their jobs dry up, when their pensions are misused, the only people who benefit are predatory lenders. So we ask ourselves, Who benefits from this craziness in Washington? And the one thing we know for sure is that it’s not us.

How can health care reform be promoted under these circumstances? A family that operated like the federal government would end up in cardboard boxes in doorways, and no economist—certainly not any of President Obama’s men—will be able to convince Americans that it’s an entirely different story for the government.

In other words, health care reform at this moment in history defies logic. Just as the war in Afghanistan does.

I make no excuses for the skunks who have come to the party, the liars who spread misinformation about death panels—the thing to remember about them is that most of them are paid skunks. They are the lackeys of the insurance industry and the HMOs. And their job is easier than that of the people who really care about the sick and elderly, because anxious people often prefer lies to truth. Slick lies are easier to swallow. They go down well with prejudices. —DM