The Democrats' Phantom Fix on Health Care

Sooner or later, Americans will pay for insuring the indigent through taxes rather than premiums. Perhaps that will be more transparent for accountants, but it essentially addresses health-care reform's hidden costs by relabeling and destigmatizing them. Under the surface, it promises only an extended version of the old system--or at least the less effective parts of it. The Baucus plan would pay for this extension by taxing top-end insurance plans. Since many of these plans were won by hard union bargaining, the tax will hit Joe Lunchpail as hard as Gordon Gekko. You cannot expect the public to be terribly impressed.

That is the tiger Democrats have by the tail. Health reform is beginning to look like a run-of-the-mill "fix" of the sort Washington applies whenever a big-spending program spins out of control. When people get attached to benefits they haven't paid for, the solution is seldom to cut the benefits. It is to rope in a set of dupes (in this case, young, healthy people) to pay for benefits they won't receive. Far from breaking with the me-first ethos that brought us to the brink of economic ruin, the individual mandate fits squarely within the time-honored Capitol Hill tradition of identifying resources that can be dislodged from future generations, and transferring them to the generation in power.