South Dakota Politics

Christmas on the Prairie

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal. 

I had the good fortune recently to attend the “Christmas on the Prairie” concert in lovely Hoven, South Dakota. The concert is an annual event held at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, sometimes known as the “Cathedral on the Prairie.” The concert spoke to much of what makes South Dakota a wonderful place to live.

Read the whole thing. 

The Great Crack Up

Every now and then I regret my withdrawal from full time political blogging.  It was often a barrel of fun, especially when readers A.I., Bill Fleming, Donald Pay, and a handful of others were also frequent commenters.  One of the joys was being proved right, at least about some things on some occasions. 

One of the things I was clearly right about was the lack of any honest public thinking in advance of the legislative adventure that became the Affordable Health Care Act.  I thought at the time that a serious examination of the American health care system was certainly in order.  It should have included a recognition of both its strengths and weaknesses, along with a comparison of our system with both the best and the worst of the systems in other nations.  No such thinking occurred. 

It’s fair to say that neither Democrats nor Republicans showed much interest in such thinking.  The Democrats knew what they wanted (an expanded role for government) and Republicans knew what they didn’t want (anything that the Democrats wanted).  However, it was the Democratic Party that held all the cards in the critical period and so it was their responsibility to step back and ask what we needed to do and how we needed to do it. 

It is easy to forget that the President initially chose to make the case for health care reform on economic grounds.  We needed to “bend the cost curve down” by making the system more efficient.  That, however, raised a set of serious questions that were never addressed. 

Was the problem that many Americans were being denied basic health care services?  If so, then it is not easy to see how we could provide a lot of people with services they had been denied in the past without it costing more money.  It was frequently stated that preventive care would save money, but this was based largely on wishful thinking in lieu of evidence and argument.  Nor was there any evidence that the basic premise was true.  We constantly heard that 30 or 35 or 40 million Americans lacked adequate insurance; but we never heard how many suffered from lack of health care services.  There is in fact no good reason to believe that more health insurance would lead to better health. 

Was the problem that lack of insurance subjects many people to economic hardship?  Again, this was more often stated than argued, let alone supported.  If it were true, then fixing it would seem to require more public funding and so hardly seems likely to bend the cost curve down. 

It is difficult, in retrospect, to avoid the suspicion that most of the supporters of the ACA knew all along that it would force millions of Americans to pay more for the health care they were getting while surrendering choices concerning their plans, doctors, etc.  The ACA was really all about redistributing wealth under the guise of reform.  That may be good policy or maybe not, but it was not a policy that the Democratic Party or the President were willing to confess.  They may have been hoping to create a large enough client population to sustain the program and their party, in the same way that Social Security and Medicare have done.  It is now clear that they didn’t think this through.  The disruptions may well be severe for a lot of voters that Democrats have long counted on.  It is not at all certain that those who benefit from the reform will be sufficient to support it. 

Finally, even if the reform were sustainable (once fully in operation) it still had to be put into operation without it blowing up in our faces.  One suspects that someone like Bill Clinton might have been able to pull this off.  The current occupant of the White House seems not so much incompetent when it comes to leadership as entirely uninterested in it.  We learn from the Washington Post that

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials.

The Obama Administration has never put anything before the immediate interests of Mr. Obama: not the environment, worker safety, or even the President’s signature piece of legislation.  That might not have been fatal if the President had the ability and interest enough to make sure that the actual policy work was done.  He doesn’t. 

A large part of the blame has to lie with the President’s enablers in the mainstream media.  They too systematically delayed the kind of investigative reporting that is now exposing Mr. Obama’s presidency until he was back in for four more years. 

The result of all this is a potential disaster for Mr. Obama, his party, and perhaps for the American health care system.  His approval rating is now below that of George W. Bush at the same point in his second term.  He may recover, of course, but it is not easy to see how.  Even if you believe that the ACA can right itself in time (and there is no good reason to believe that right now) it is unlikely to do so before the next two elections have run their course.  Meanwhile, the confidence of Americans in their political system has rarely or never been more compromised. 

We may all come to rue the day that we entrusted the most important executive office on the planet to a man who had never run so much as a lemonade stand and allowed a Congress to throw our health care system up into the air without any idea what they were doing.  I should think that my friends on the left will come to regret it most of all. 

Patriotism starts at home

Here is my Pierre Capital Journal column speaking against mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.  A snippet:

The Sioux Falls school district recently found itself in a bit of a kerfuffle. Until recently, only elementary students were required to say the Pledge of Allegiance each day. The district expanded this to middle school students but excluded high school students. Eventually the school board capitulated to those in favor of mandatory Pledge recitation.

Thus controversy. Did the board originally abandon patriotism in the high schools, or does the decision to make the Pledge mandatory represent an imposition on the rights of high school students?

 

It Tolls for the Website

We may be witnessing the most awesome crackup in the history of American Government.  Today is the day that the ObamaCare website was supposed to finally be working, after it was originally supposed to be working.  Well, yesterday was the day.  I am writing after midnight.  Is it working? 

If it were, bells would be ringing across the land, or at least in the blue state media.  I hear no bells.  I went to the Washington Post website just now to look for something, anything, on the second coming on the ObamaCare website Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker died in a fiery crash and President Obama shopped at the Politics and Prose bookstore.  Maybe that tragic crash was a metaphor.  I’m not sure about the bookstore. 

The New York Times leads with a story about the attempt to rescue “a Health Care Site and Obama”.  To the Times’ credit, it is a good story. 

As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama’s chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia…

Out of that tense Oval Office meeting grew a frantic effort aimed at rescuing not only the insurance portal and Mr. Obama’s credibility, but also the Democratic philosophy that an activist government can solve big, complex social problems. Today, that rescue effort is far from complete.

The website, which the administration promised would “function smoothly” for most people by Nov. 30, remains a work in progress. It is more stable, with many more people able to use it simultaneously than just two weeks ago. But it still suffers sporadic crashes, and large parts of the vital “back end” that processes enrollment data and transactions with insurers remain unbuilt.

Allow me to translate.  “Far from complete” means “no”.  The website isn’t close to working.  If you don’t believe me, ask the Obama Administration.  They are now trying desperately to keep people from actually using the website.  Again from the NYT:

WASHINGTON — White House officials, fearful that the federal health care website may again be overwhelmed this weekend, have urged their allies to hold back enrollment efforts so the insurance marketplace does not collapse under a crush of new users.

At the same time, administration officials said Tuesday that they had decided not to inaugurate a big health care marketing campaign planned for December out of concern that it might drive too many people to the still-fragile HealthCare.gov.

At this point, a new edition of a picture dictionary could put Obama’s face next to the word “disaster”.