Obamacare: Not the Answer

President Barack Obama addressed the nation last night in an attempt to sell the public on the presumed need for the federal government to get involved in health care. Yet in a speech lined with rhetoric but short on details, he failed to make the case. Indeed, it is hard to decipher whether he was making a case for anything in particular at all.

Seeking to appear moderate, which is little more than seeming unprincipled, he asked for a government health care plan to compete with private plans in order to give people choice. But who would underwrite this plan, and what choices would the purchasers of it have? That is but one of the many great unanswered questions on the matter, and indeed the very reason debate on overhauling health care has stalled.

Yet in a line which is bound to become famous, and in what may be the most telling aspect of his speech, the President also said: "I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it."

We are left to believe that those who oppose him are simply playing politics. So despite all his fancy rhetoric, despite his plea at Notre Dame several months ago that we need to work things out without "demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side", despite his supposed belief that we must understand that varying points of view are in fact held by different people of nonetheless heartfelt principles who ought to be seen as such, those of us who oppose him on as relatively shallow of an issue as health care are merely playing politics to work and act against him.

Health care is about more than politics, Mr. President, and shame on you for the hypocritical attempt to make Republicans your scapegoats on the issue. Particularly as you make the question so political as to avoid imperative details on the matter, it can only be viewed as the lowly interest of securing your legacy at work. It sounds nothing more than vain.

What we have here is a reprise of that old, two headed liberal idea that they're the inclusive ones who think of everybody while those opposed to them are evil and small minded. That has not, so far, played in Peoria. Let us hope the show closes before it reaches further.