A New Plan for Health Care - Let's Get Joe Klein to Pay for It!

So today there were two contrasting editorials on the health care debate highlighted over at Real Clear Politics. In the first one, Joe Klein of Time magazine claims that the Republicans are nihilists and dumps on them because they don't have a plan to reform health care or at least they don't have a plan to cover everyone. Here's a tidbit.

There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009 ... This is a difficult situation for the President. Cynicism about government is always easy, even if it now seems apparent that it was government action — by both Obama and, yes, George W. Bush — that prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. I watched Obama as he traveled the Rocky Mountain West, holding health-care forums, trying to lance the boil by eliciting questions from the irrational minority that had pulverized the public forums held by lesser pols.

That irrational minority seems to include the Congressional Budget Office whose math work has shown that Health Care Reform is going to cost more. A lot more. Trying to cover 47,000,000 people with health insurance is going to be expensive. Meanwhile, the irrational people know that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all going bankrupt. Joe doesn't deal with this, he just rails against the nihilist Republicans that refuse to come up with a plan to do the impossible - cover everyone without spending a ton of cash.

Meanwhile, Dan Henninger makes an outstanding point in his editorial today. Barack Obama is trying not just to sell the impossible - covering everyone with no increase in the deficit, but he's trying to do it while California and New York are showing that the government can't do it all. In fact, it can't do what it's already signed up to do with any amount of competence.

In California and New York, the two most economically important and famous of the 50 states, the legislatures have been revealed as incompetent to manage the public's money. The budget crises in California and New York aren't just a normal turn in the fiscal cycle. Those governments have finally hit the wall.

Oblivious to manifest failure, the liberal-progressive idea keeps itself afloat on intellectual water wings-insisting that most people still believe that if government commits itself to accomplishing a public good, it will more or less succeed despite the difficulties and inefficiencies of these great projects. Needed good gets done.

And therein lies the rub.

With American socialism in its death throes in New York and California, one party is trying to push it further on and another is opting out. Pushing further down a failed road, which is what President Obama wants to do, is not progressive, it's stupid. Progressive is going backwards, going away from the concepts that are clearly bankrupting the nation. It's not nihilism to offer no counter proposal, it's realism.

Of course, I may be ignoring the easy solution to all of this. We could just get Joe Klein to pay for it all. That's not a nihilist attitude, is it?

Joe's wallet. Let's empty it in the interest of universal coverage.