Obamacare: Big & Costly!

From Yuval Levin and William Kristol in the Weekly Standard:
As long as the health care reform plan envisioned by the Obama administration and congressional Democrats was just a series of slogans, it was easy for the left to build support for it and difficult for the right to imagine how it could be stopped. It is hard, after all, to object to vague promises to cut health care costs and cover the uninsured and improve health outcomes. The brute fact of Democratic domination of Washington gave key health industry players an incentive to look as if they wanted to cooperate with the Obama administration. The whole affair began to assume an air of inevitability.
But as general slogans give way to particular plans, reality is setting in. Outlines and drafts of the key House and Senate bills began to emerge last week, and the grim reality of what the Democrats in fact have in mind has started to exercise an undeniable effect upon the politics of health care.
The fact is, the Democrats' proposals are a liberal wish list of expansions of the role of government in health care, combining an array of taxes, regulations, incentives, and mandates aimed over time to create a massive and unfunded new entitlement that would limit patient choices, ration care, and bankrupt the Treasury. The Democrats' plan would force everyone into the system through an individual mandate and lead employers to drop their health coverage; their new public insurance plan would then price private insurers out of the game and attract the refugees from private coverage into the public system. All of this would put us well on the road to government-run health care. . . .
The public plan is a gradual path to single payer health care, aimed at moving American health care in a European or Canadian direction.
This has made the Obama plan increasingly controversial, if not imperiled. Essentially every Republican in Washington has expressed firm opposition to a government plan, and a growing number of Democrats are doing the same. Nebraska senator Ben Nelson has called it a deal-breaker. Louisiana's Mary Landrieu said last week she would not vote for it. Many other Democrats in the Senate and the House are wary, to say the least.
Meanwhile, those industry groups who joined President Obama at the White House for a photo-op last month are now worried. One of them, the American Medical Association, announced last week it would oppose outright any plan with a government insurance option. . . .
The good news is that opinion polls suggest the vast majority of Americans do not want their health coverage forcibly changed by the federal government. Indeed, Americans today are less persuaded of the need for radical reform than they were the last time the Democrats tried to enact one, in 1993. As Michael Barone points out, "An April tracking poll conducted for the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that voters rank changing health care below strengthening the economy, stabilizing Medicare and Social Security, and reducing the federal budget deficit on a list of eight possible priorities. . . . . The blunt fact is that most Americans are satisfied with their health insurance and don't believe major legislation will improve things for them."
The American public is right. ObamaCare is wrong. It should and can be defeated.