Now It’s the Dems Turn to Experience Mediscare

The Dems are finally discovering what should have been obvious from the sea of gray and white heads in evidence in all those town hall videos: senior citizens loathe Obamacare.

The Washington Post finally discovers what should have been obvious from the sea of gray and white heads in evidence in all those town hall videos: senior citizens loathe Obamacare. It's not hard to see why: they have Medicare now (recently enhanced by virtually free prescription drugs). Many have "Medi-gap" coverage as well through their former employers. It's hard to see how they can "win" under Obamacare. Add to that scary (and not terribly exaggerated) stories about being forced to undergo "end of life" counseling, and voila! Instant town hell. Also, as any rookie marketing executive can tell you, getting older people to try a new product is well-nigh impossible. They are creatures of habit, and anyone - politicians especially - who try changing those habits does so at their peril.  You would think the Democrats would know this. They are now getting a taste of the medicine they have ladled out so lovingly for the last quarter-century whenever a Republican president made noises about "reforming" Social Security. Democrats have always viewed national healthcare as a big political winner for them, a la Social Security. But frankly, I never really understood the politics of health care reform, from the liberal perspective. The biggest likely beneficiaries - the poor, the young, the marginally employed, the illegal - are already solidly in the Democrats' camp. Not obvious that there are many new votes to be mined there. By contrast, the almost certain losers, aside from senior citizens, are working, middle-class voters with solid (if not gold-plated) corporate health plans. (Like me.) Frankly, I think any politician would be mad to try courting the first tranche of voters at the expense of the second. Unlike the young, the poor and the illegal, who are unreliable voters at best, seniors treat polling places as if they were banks. (Why not? For them, they are.) And when you get middle-class Americans sufficiently riled up to take to the streets, look out. (Think 1994.) The whole "national healthcare" subject has a bit of a dated ring to it, it seems to me. The Democrats appear to be clinging to it almost out of habit, rather than good sense. The world has changed in ways Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn't even have imagined. Trying to implement his vision of a vast, centralized, enormously costly bureaucracy in 2009 seems wildly out of sync with the times. It's as if John F. Kennedy had taken office in 1961 pledging to finally implement the free coinage of silver. The emerging conventional wisdom is that the Obama administration will have to settle for a scaled-down reform of the health insurance industry. Maybe. Things are getting so wild out there that I wouldn't rule out a rerun of Hillarycare and see it die altogether. The politics just don't seem to work.