David Frum, American Enterprise Institute fellow and former special assistant to President George W. Bush that authored the idiotic and counterproductive phrase "Axis of Evil", has just published an interesting call to D.C.'s Republican greybeards to reconsider their blocking of Democrats' health care finance reform.
He's calling for Republicans to throw the fight. Now.
He begins with the unassailable stats we're all familiar with, and decries that the United States will soon spend nearly twice the proportion of GDP on health care as second place Switzerland. Then, to soften the blow that he is in fact acknowledging that the Obama Administration reforms will contain, if not reduce, the out-of-control increase in the cost to our economy of providing health care, he puts the benefit of passing the President's plan in terms of Republican priorities that even the dimmest Senate lizard-brain can understand:
If U.S. health-care costs dropped to Swiss levels, it would be as if the United States suddenly got its entire military budget for free, with enough change to equal the entire economy of South Africa.
If U.S. health-care costs dropped to Swiss levels, the US budget deficit would vanish as soon as the U.S. economy emerged from recession.
If U.S. health-care costs dropped to Swiss levels, the United States could afford to cut income tax rates by 80% or abolish its entire Social Security payroll tax system.
Couched in his analysis is a tacit recognition that the ideological battle against a "socialist health care takeover" is a battle that has already been lost. He observes, "Together, federal and state health care programs now spend more on health than the private U.S. economy. In other words, the U.S. health system is now majority government funded." And, its share of spending is growing.
It is the diminishing budgetary flexibility caused by built-in increases in health care funding, and the political pressure to cannibalize parts of the Federal budget that are sacred to Republican electoral success that motivate Frum to call for the end of Congressional obstruction:
As a future Republican president or Republican Congress struggles with health care costs a decade from now, he or she or they may well look back on 2009 as an opportunity thrown away — a chance to hold the line on health costs and let the Democrats take the blame.
Someday, conservatives may look back on health care and wistfully regret: "That would have been a very good fight to lose."
From Frum's lips to McConnell and Boehner's ears, I say! I never thought there'd be a day when I supported something David Frum proposed.
UPDATE: Though Frum's caution to Republican leaders was published on a Canadian paper's 'opinion' Web page, which might seem an obscure, below-the-radar venue, he's promoted the piece on his own FrumForum, a site he has "dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement."
He's actively promoting the idea. I came across it on The Hill's Blog Briefing Room, so he has definitely gotten the attention of opinion leaders in Washington.