Barack Obama was interviewed tonight on 60 Minutes by Steve Kroft. This little nugget had been previewed in pre-interview press hype. Obama states that he will be held accountable by voters if health care restructuring fails, but in fact just the opposite is true:
I have no interest in having a bill get passed that fails. That doesn’t work. You know, I intend to be President for a while, and once this bill passes, I own it. And if people look and say, “You know what? This hasn’t reduced my costs. My premiums are still going up 25 percent, insurance companies are still jerking me around,” I’m the one who’s going to be held responsible. So I have every incentive to get this right.
Kroft immediately went on to another topic. Was Kroft even listening? Didn’t he know that as good as this statement by Obama sounded, it actually made no sense at all?
The new health care plans and restructuring will not take place until after the 2012 Presidential election. Obama will go into the 2012 election without anyone having experienced directly the impact of his plans. Obama will not be eligible to run again in 2016, regardless of whether he is held “accountable” for ruining our health care system.
If Obama’s motivation is to be “President for a while” as he says, then the ultimate success or failure of the health care restructuring plans will have absolutely no impact.
We, not Obama, will be held accountable for Obama’s failure and our own mass delusion.
The mainstream media still is too smitten to care.
UPDATE: Commenter Melanie asks why the new plans don’t take effect until after 2012. Here is the explanation given by Obamacare supporter Ezra Klein:
Most of the major provisions in the House’s health-care reform bill begin in 2013….The slow start is a way of holding down costs in the 10-year budget window. If the bill begins in 2010, but the subsidies don’t kick in until 2013, then that’s three years that are under the budget but aren’t costing much money. That means the new health-care system can really cost an average of $140 billion each year, as opposed to $100 billion, and that means you can afford a better system.
It’s just a budget game so Obama can keep the 10-year cost (which is the time frame used in these budget estimates) down, since there really are only 6 years of costs build into the 10 year projection, but 10 years of tax revenue. Of course, Klein doesn’t understand that this doesn’t mean you “can afford a better system,” it means you are putting yourself into the same situation as homeowners who take mortgages that are fixed artifically low for a short time then revert back to higher rates. And we know how that worked out.
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