Beacon Street Journal

President Obama’s plans to radically overhaul the nation’s health care system has come to a screeching halt. The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates of the still inchoate plan — $1 trillion over 10 years — was the final nail in the coffin. To add insult to injury, the proposed plan would only cover a little less than a third of those now without coverage. Even by the fiscally lax standards of tax and spend liberalism, that isn’t much of a bargain. This helps explain why there are insufficient votes, at present, for Obama’s astronomically high price-tag plan.

After just over five months in office, the nation is awash in a staggering sea of trillion dollar deficits and the possibility of another trillion was a bit much, even for some die-hard Democrats, who have until now, marched lockstep behind Obama’s plans to spend the nation into oblivion. With the exception of a sycophantic Washington press corps, most of the American public wasn’t buying what Obama was selling in terms of his plan to control one sixth of the nation’s economy. Not only was the premise of his entire health care initiative based on a faulty assumption (the way out of the economic recession is to incur additional trillions on health care spending), but his representation that no new taxes would be necessary for its funding, was justifiably and derisively dismissed as ludicrous.

Since his inauguration, Obama, with the support of a Democratic Congress, has had his way with his domestic spending initiatives and priorities. The only factor constraining his ambitious and audacious proposals was time. The Obama presidency represented the vehicle for the fulfillment of thirty years of pent-up demands of liberalism. Beginning with the $787 billion stimulus bill, Obama and the left-wing congressional cohorts have used the economic crisis as a justification for the most fiscally reckless liberal spending spree.

Hence, the enactment of the liberal wish list, of necessity, was a now or never proposition. This is why, despite the enormity of the task, Obama has been so insistent on getting his legislation through Congress by summer’s end. With health care, the great danger has always been that, if the American people got a whiff of the true designs of the Obama policy, what George Will has characterized as the “stealth single-payer agenda”, support might evaporate. With the release of the latest unemployment figures, which cannot be reconciled with the false promises of the job-creating stimulus bill, we may have reached this point.

Obama’s health care spending proposal fell victim to three intersecting indices. One, from closing Guantanamo, to the government takeover of GM, Americans do not share his economic or political priorities. Second, most voters, unlike Obama, are concerned with the out of control deficits that have ballooned during his early tenure in office. Indeed, a recent Rasmussen poll finds that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on economic issues. Third, the preexisting gap between Obama’s personal popularity and the popularity of his domestic programs is starting to close.

In short, in response to the pressing question of how do we pay for all these welfare goodies, most voters realize that Obama’s promise of no new taxes on 95% of households, in conjunction with the fiction of proposed health care “savings”, like so many of his other promises, has an expiration date. The reality is that under Obama’s plan, health care itself would be rationed and taxes would be increased, either through the income tax or by taxing health care benefits, or both).

The defeat of his health care agenda may prove to be a watershed event for the fortunes of the Obama Administration.