We’ve been dealing with health care reform for the better part of a year now, and progress today is still as iffy as it was before the “Summer of Angry Town Halls”.  The Senate is debating amendments and provisions, jockeying for votes, and trying to keep together the fragile coalition which allowed for debate on the Senate floor to occur.  The average American, having long ago made up their mind, is probably becoming tired of the same speeches, the same talking points, and the intolerable actions of Congress people on both sides of the aisle.

In an AP_article running in the Philadelphia Inquirer we hear the tale of the on going fight in DC:

WASHINGTON – The fate of President Obama’s health-care overhaul is in the hands of a dozen or so political moderates in the Senate. What makes it unpredictable is that they don’t agree on two critical issues – abortion and whether to allow the government to sell insurance in competition with private insurers.

Floor debate continued yesterday, and it was hard to see how Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could put together 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster and get a final bill off the floor. On abortion coverage and a government health-insurance plan, the moderates were lining up in different places. Reid has 60 senators in the Democratic caucus, and nary a vote to spare.

How did this happen?  During Obama’s Presidential Campaign, we were given the story about the destructive potential of our health care system.  Obama has given the same health care speech at least 3/4 of a billion times over the last year, each time highlighting the destruction and devastation the American health care system was wreaking.  This speech is summed up in the official whitehouse.gov infomercial:

Comprehensive health care reform can no longer wait. Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business, and government budgets. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, a rate 3 times faster than cumulative wage increases. This forces families to sit around the kitchen table to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying health premiums. Given all that we spend on health care, American families should not be presented with that choice. The United States spent approximately $2.2 trillion on health care in 2007, or $7,421 per person – nearly twice the average of other developed nations. Americans spend more on health care than on housing or food. If rapid health cost growth persists, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2025, one out of every four dollars in our national economy will be tied up in the health system. This growing burden will limit other investments and priorities that are needed to grow our economy. Rising health care costs also affect our economic competitiveness in the global economy, as American companies compete against companies in other countries that have dramatically lower health care costs.

It’s obvious, listening to Obama and the Democrat team that health care reform is of the utmost urgency.  They insist that health care reform is a brave, courageous, and financially sound choice for our nation to make.  They spout off rhetoric about duty and compassion.  They claim that their plan will be deficit_neutral.  They tell us of the $500_billion in waste and fraud they will squeeze out of Medicare and Medicaid (though not why they haven’t already squeezed that waste and fraud out).  In short, they have been painting a picture for over a year now, a picture in which health care reform is so vital that it goes beyond America’s self interest to pass it.  In fact, to listen to them, it seems as though we’re all a bunch of drooling idiots if we don’t throw a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes for every member of Congress who votes “yea” for the bills…

But.  They’re still having trouble passing the sucker.  Why?

To answer this, I propose that we all become students of history for a minute.  I’m going to quote from one of my favorite books of all time, Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy:

If we consider now what is easy and what is difficult to persuade a people to, we may make this distinction: either what you wish to persuade them to represents at first sight gain or loss, or it seems brave or cowardly. And if you propose to them anything that upon its face seems profitable and courageous, though there be really a loss concealed under it which may involve the ruin of the republic, the multitude will ever be most easily persuaded to it. But if the measure proposed seems doubtful and likely to cause loss, then it will be difficult to persuade the people to it even though the benefit and welfare of the republic were concealed under it.

With that passage in mind, I find it interesting to see the decline in support for the reforms as time progresses.  It’s not unsurprising, once you take a reasonable look at the facts, but it is interesting.  From Rasmussen:

While advocates say the plan is needed to control the cost of health care, 56% of voters now say it will have the opposite impact and push prices even higher. Just 17% believe passage of the plan will lead to lower costs.

 Fifty percent (50%) believe passage of the legislation will lead to a lower quality of care while just 18% believe the care will get better.

…

As Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “The most important fundamental is that 68% of American voters have health insurance coverage they rate good or excellent. … Most of these voters approach the health care reform debate fearing that they have more to lose than to gain.”

 Obama and the Democrats started off on the right path.  They knew their politics and tried to convince us of the moral imperative of health care reform, tried to tell us of all of the good that it would do for the needy, the victims of the evil capitalist health insurance industry, and the doctors who are amputating people to line their pockets.  They told us that they would make all of our health care desires reality without costing us any money, without denying anyone access, and that they were taking over Disney’s job as the organization which “makes all your dreams come true”!

But they didn’t remember that the average American realizes that “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.  They spent the first 8 years of the decade attacking a Republican administration for painting an unrealistically rosy picture, reminding us over and over again (and rightly so!) of the horrors the GWB administration was committing.  Torture, lying to and spying on civilians, unwarranted wars, the body count of soldiers, on and on, ad nauseam, until the minute their guy was elected.  Then they expected us to swallow their BS without a peep?

Whatever happened to “Question Authority”?  Now we’re supposed to believe that this group of popularity contest winners has all the answers when the last batch of imbeciles had none?  Why?  Nothing has changed with the election of Obama and the Democrats!  Still just a bunch of un-experienced empty suits up there on Capitol Hill.  Why would things be any different?

No, the Democrats have forgotten another of Machiavelli’s more memorable quotes from the Discourses, one which is plaguing them more and more as time passes:

The quickest way of opening the eyes of the people is to find the means of making them descend to particulars, seeing that to look at things only in a general way deceives them.

If they wanted health care reform without a fight, they should have passed it when the lemmings were still stuck on undefined “hope” and “change”.

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