WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Maybe President Obama would have done better after all to repeat Hillary Clinton's mistake in 1994. At least he wouldn't have to spend time shooting at unicorns in the heat of August.
Clinton's error was to pull from her hat a health care reform bill planned down to the last comma by friends of the Clintons. Her bigger error was to offend insurance companies, but conventional wisdom is that she failed by limiting the number of voices with input to her plan.
That is the failure Obama tried to avoid by not offering a health care bill of his own. He let Congress write the bill. So far, there are five bills. House committees wrote three, and a Senate committee wrote one. A different Senate committee is still writing the last one.
President Obama has not named a favorite. Congress watchers expect the final bill to be a medley of what's on the floor, with Obama having major input near the end. That's how things worked before government-by-sound-bite.
You keep hearing about the "Obama health care plan" and "Obamacare," but neither exists. If you listen closely, you will hear that in the responsible media, the speakers get it right — as "ideas" or "goals," not "plan" — when they read from a script. But as soon as they put the paper down, they lapse into talk of an "Obama plan." There are five plans. None is Mr. Obama's.
The one that doesn't exist, though, is the most yelled-about plan at lawmakers' "town hall" meetings. One fan of rude behavior has opined that people get frustrated when the members don't answer their constituents' questions. Right. It's only good manners to give an answer to a simple question like: "Socialist! Socialist! Socialist!"
Where were those folks when we frog-marched into the $700 billion War of the Imaginary WMDs? If socialism is the hot button, where were they when the previous administration socialized the big banks' losses?
My favorite question is "40 million illegal aliens!" Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., heard and ducked that one in Tampa. At first, I thought the guy who kept shouting it had confused the number of undocumented immigrants with the number of uninsured when Clinton tried to pass her reforms. Official sources say the number he seemed to want is 11 million to 12 million. But no. There is a Web source that says it's 38 million on its way to 40 million. The media undercounts by using official figures instead of getting the right number from Web blabber.
No wonder people are angry.
If President Obama had written his own bill, he and his supporters would have something tangible to defend. Instead, he is talking about what people who hold their hands over their ears when the president speaks call the "Obama plan."
I have problems with the congressional committees. Their opening bids on health care reform were awfully centrist for a bunch of Democrats. As they move farther to the right to get more votes, I doubt that they will produce a program to insure almost everybody and still attack costs honestly.
They already made a frighteningly swift transition from acting on what we learned since the Clinton plan of 1994 to sound bites that they think will work.
They seem to be setting themselves up for a binge of buying off everyone in the end to get votes to pass something. I am afraid that the something will be duct tape that costs more than what we already spend per capita on health care, which is twice what other countries spend. But I've seen legislation at this stage before when it looked just as bad and turned out OK.
The town halls of summer could be the place to bring up my problems. But I am at a disadvantage there because my questions for Congress do not end in exclamation points.
President Obama thought that by keeping the health care plans open for debate, he could lead a calm, rational discussion that came to consensus. He seems to have us confused with a different Congress and a different country.
Tom Blackburn writes for The Palm Beach Post.
