What Next?

The talking heads are asking themselves on talk radio the same thing blue collar conservatives are asking each in private: What next?

What next is not an easy question even if it is a simple one. Dick Morris has a step-by-step plan for repealing the legislation:

1. Restore the Medicare cuts mandated in this bill. Block the reduction of physicians’ fees by 21 percent scheduled to take effect this fall. Override the cuts in Medicare that require annual approval by Congress. Challenge the Democrats over each and every cut. Try to peel away enough votes to stop the cuts from driving doctors and hospitals to refuse to take Medicare patients.

2. Defeat the Democrats in the 2010 election! Start with the traitors who voted no in November and then switched to a shameful yes when it counted in March. Then go on to win the open seats in the House and Senate. And then fight to replace as many Democrats as possible. Remember: Any Democrat who voted no would have voted yes if they had needed his or her vote. The only way to repeal ObamaCare is to vote Republican.

3. Defund. Once we get the majority in both chambers, defund appropriations for the ObamaCare program. The bill passed by the Congress and signed by the president is simply an authorization measure. Funds must be appropriated for it each year by Congress. Through zero-funding these changes, we can cripple them before they take full effect.

4. Repeal. And, once we defeat Barack Obama, we need to proceed to repeal this disastrous plan before it can ruin our healthcare system. Then we must replace it with a Republican alternative that relies on the marketplace, tax incentives and individual responsibility to provide healthcare to all Americans.

I often look to Dick Morris for his insight if not his conclusions. This time is no different. We thought we strangled healthcare during the townhall debates. We did not. We thought the rising unpopularity of the bill demonstrated in every single poll taken on the issue would kill it. It did not. We thought the election of Scott Brown had killed the bill. He did not. We look for the courts to strike down the bill because of the individual mandate provision which is grossly unconstitutional. It may not.

On the plus side, there is actually precedent for repealing an entitlement program. The most obvious example is Clinton's welfare reform but even that has been quietly reversed by Obama in the stimulus bill. The real precedent we must look to is the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act (MCCA) of 1988 . Although liberals (including the author of the cited article) still insist that if it had been better explained it would have survived, we have heard this all before. Obama blamed himself for not explaining the current bill for its unpopularity but even as the public gained more and more knowledge about the bill, its popularity declined. The American people understand perfectly that large entitlement programs rob from future generations and are completely unsustainable.

Even worse, some Republicans are praising parts of the bill saying they only need to "reform the reform." Talk about pre-existing conditions dominates whenever a Republican wants to try to set himself apart and act like he's an independent and rational observer. No one wants an insurance company to deny coverage to someone who already has a policy and needs care, this is something Republicans agree on. However, when Democrats talk about pre-existing conditions they are not talking about this. What they refer to is known as "community rating" in which the healthy 19 year old is charged the same rate as as a 60 year old cancer patient when neither has carried insurance prior and buys into the system. The purpose of insurance is to be a risk pool, you pay when you are young and healthy and use it very little and you file claims when you are older and use it often. If someone can choose not not to buy insurance until they are 60 with cancer, it is no longer a risk pool! If the companies are forced to charge the 60 year old terminal patient who just purchased insurance after his diagnosis the same price as the 19 year old, rates will skyrocket because the risk management has been legislated out of the system.

The only reason a 60-year old would need to buy insurance is because insurance is tied to employment and most people are lucky enough not to work all their lives. If insurance was tied to the individual and not the job the number of people with lapsing policies would decrease substantially. If policies could be carried from state-to-state this would also cause a huge decrease in the number of lapsing policies. Unfortunately the health insurance industry is legislated that any major or even minor change in your life causes you to lose your insurance. Simply by issuing individuals the same tax credits that companies have and repealing the law that keeps companies from competing across state lines would solve the pre-existing condition problem. Don't wade through the muck of this bill in hopes of finding a gem, repeal the whole damn thing!

Which brings us back to the question of can we repeal it. The MCCA proves it is possible but is it likely? Assuming (and this is by no means a certainty) we regain the House and Senate and the Presidency by 2012, will the Republicans repeal the bill? Bush tried to privatize Social Security in 2006 and failed. There has never been any real attempt to reform Medicare or Medicaid despite their crippling costs currently at $44 trillion in the hole. Even Reagan pledged to abolish the Department of Energy which was put in place by his feckless one-term predecessor and failed. Government grows and almost never shrinks. I said when Obama was elected, sometimes you need a Carter to get to a Reagan. But in reality, we don't need a Reagan we need a Coolidge. Between 1923 and 1928, Calvin Coolidge's first year and last full year in office, he accomplished a feat that seems unbelievable at the end of the century: Federal spending didn't increase. If no President has even had the nerve to reform these generation-old entitlements, are we to believe the next one will abolish the largest one ever?