Note to Congress:  Avoid passing bizarrely complicated, economy-transforming legislation that you have not read, especially in the face of overwhelming public opposition.  In The Weekly Standard, Jeffrey H. Anderson describes the “steady stream of revelations of previously undiscovered horrors buried in the bowels of ObamaCare”:

Since passage, reports have revealed that ObamaCare would cost over $1 trillion by any standard, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), not “merely” $940 billion as previously reported (while its total costs in its real first decade, 2014 to 2023, would continue to be well over $2 trillion); that ObamaCare has prompted major corporations to discuss dropping their employer-provided health-care plans; that businesses would have to file 1099s not only for every person to whom they pay $600 in wages but for every vendor with whom they do $600 in business, thereby imposing a paperwork nightmare and incentivizing companies to avoid doing business with a myriad of small firms rather than a handful of big ones; that ObamaCare would create 159 new federal agencies, offices, or programs; that the Obama administration’s Medicare Chief Actuary says ObamaCare would raise U.S. health costs by $311 billion in relation to current law and would shift about 14 million people off of employer-provided insurance — and some of them onto Medicaid; that ObamaCare’s would discourage employment, as — for example — hiring a 25th worker would cost a business $5,600 in addition to wages and benefits; that ObamaCare would impose a severe marriage penalty, offering additional subsidies as high as $10,425 a year if couples merely avoid marriage; that a lone provision in ObamaCare, which would penalize employers if their employees spend more than 9.5 percent of their household income on insurance premiums, would cut the net income of businesses like White Castle by more than half; that even though ObamaCare was supposed to get people out of emergency rooms and into doctors’ offices, those who build emergency rooms say the effect will be just the opposite and that they are gearing up for increased business; that doctors shortages are looming and would be accentuated by ObamaCare, both because more people would seek care (otherwise, what would the $2 trillion be buying?) and because fewer people would likely enter a demanding profession that would now promise greater restrictions and lower pay; and that President Obama’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid under ObamaCare is an open advocate of the British National Health Services’ NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence) and its methods of rationing care.

Opposition to ObamaCare has grown sharply with all of the revelations: “Americans now favor repeal by a margin of almost 2-to-1, with 63 percent favoring repeal and just 32 percent opposing it,” according to a Rasmussen poll cited in the same article.

But repeal is a tough row to hoe.  There’s little doubt that a Democratic bloodbath in November will dramatically alter the balance of power in Washington — but Obama will still be president, and still have veto power.  Even if the Republicans win every single Senate race throughout the country (not gonna happen), there will be enough Democratic Senators to sustain a veto.  Although I expect Harry Reid’s successor as Democratic leader will have a harder time enforcing party loyalty.

True repeal will probably have to wait until after the 2012 presidential election, unless the Supreme Court steps in to rule Obamacare unconstitutional.  (Hm… I wonder if my former colleague Elena Kagan would have to recuse herself?)  In the meantime, look for the next Congress to find creative ways to deny funding and delay implementation of key provisions.

In their desperation to pass some kind of health care bill now now now now now, the Democrats have annexed one-sixth of the economy despite the opposition of a majority of Americans.  The debate over the bill may be over, but the unintended consequences are only starting to make themselves known. A new Fortune article provides a glimpse of the future under Obamacare, and it ain’t pretty.  (Hat tip: Neo.)

Remember when Rep. Henry Waxman, whose photo can be found in the dictionary next to the word “grandstanding,” summoned the leaders of AT&T, Caterpillar, Verizon, Deere and other companies to grill them about the write-downs they took  to recognize the costs of the newly-passed legislation? The hearings were abruptly canceled, and the Democratic staff of the committee put out a memo acknowledging what had been clear all along — that the write-downs were not just appropriate, but in fact legally required.  Fortune reviewed the subpoenaed documents and discovered why the hearings were canceled:

Nowhere in the five-page report did the majority staff mention that not one, but all four companies, were weighing the costs and benefits of dropping their coverage.

AT&T produced a PowerPoint slide entitled “Medical Cost Versus No Coverage Penalty.” A document prepared for Verizon by consulting firm Hewitt Resources stated, “Even though the proposed assessments [on companies that do not provide health care] are material, they are modest when compared to the average cost of health care,” and that to avoid costs and regulations, “employers may consider exiting the health care market and send employees to the Exchanges.” (Under the new bill, employees who lose their coverage will purchase health care through state-run exchanges.)

Kenneth Huhn, vice president of labor relations at Deere, said in an internal email that his company should look at the alternatives to providing health benefits, which “would amount to denying coverage and just paying the penalty,” and that he felt he already had the ability to make this change under his company’s labor agreement. Caterpillar felt it would have to give “serious consideration” to the penalty option.

It’s these analyses — which show it’s a lot cheaper to “pay” than to “play” — that threaten to overthrow the traditional architecture of health care.

Of course, none of these companies have dropped employee coverage yet.  But can there be any doubt that they and many others will do so if the economics are compelling enough?

From the beginning, the Democrats have relied on the premise that people who like their current health coverage will be able to keep it. The phony economic calculations that enabled the Democrats to claim that Obamacare would not add to the deficit were based in part on assumptions that big companies would continue to offer health care coverage to their employees.  Oops.

During the Obamacare debate, I took to referring to the public “option” — with scare quotes around the word option — as a shorthand way of reiterating the truism that no corporation can possibly compete with the resources of the United States government.

Here’s a longhand version of the argument, from an August 18 post:

Despite Obama’s disingenuous talk about having the insurance companies “compete” with a “public option” backed by the vast resources and regulatory clout of the government, most people recognize that no such competition is sustainable.

With a public option, the corporations who currently fund health insurance for their employees will have two choices — they can continue to negotiate with insurance companies to try to get the best deal for themselves and their employees, or they can get out of the middle, stop bothering with insurance companies and just dump all their employees into the public “option.” Hmmm… decisions, decisions.

People intuitively understand that the “public option” is a first step toward a single-payer world in which the government directly controls one-sixth of the economy, and has no competitive incentive to reduce costs and improve service.

I celebrated when it became clear the public “option” would not be part of the final health care bill.  But even in the legislation that was passed, the incentives for companies to wash their hands and walk away from health care will be overwhelming.

November can’t come soon enough.

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Mark Steyn sums it up in The Corner, shortly before the measure passed:

Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier [reprinted here] shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers” in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada and elsewhere.

Read the whole thing, it’s only another couple of paragraphs.  K-Lo adds a postscript after the vote (reprinted here in full):

Congratulations, Democrats. Beginning now, you own the health-care system in America. Every hiccup. Every complaint. Every long line. All yours.

If Obamacare passes — and as the endgame plays out today, that feels like the way to bet — it will pass without a single Republican vote in either house of Congress.  Historic legislation indeed:

Regardless of the political fallout, historians say health-care reform will take its place in the same category as the enactment of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965…

But there is a major difference between this health-care battle and the debates that preceded passage of Social Security and Medicare. Although there was opposition to those measures — conservative opponents called Medicare socialized medicine — in the end they passed with overwhelming, bipartisan majorities.

The House approved the Medicare bill on a vote of 313 to 115, including 65 Republicans — nearly half the GOP caucus at the time. The Senate approved the measure by 68 to 21, including 13 of the 27 Republicans.

Social Security passed the House in 1935 by 372 to 77. On that vote, 77 Republicans joined the majority and 18 Republicans opposed it. In the Senate, the vote was 77 to 6, with five of 19 Republicans in opposition.

In one important way, however, Obamacare will be like Medicare:  Financially unsustainable. Businessweek:

The Democrats’ model of a successful government health-care program, Medicare, is going broke. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is already insolvent on a cash-flow basis and will be exhausted within the next eight years, according to the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees’ 2009 Annual Report.

And that’s before the baby boomers start to retire.

If ObamaCare passes, the outlook isn’t that much different. While the Senate bill has some good features, including the creation of health insurance exchanges where individuals and small businesses can buy coverage, it fails to tackle the basic problem: the lack of incentives. Consumers are divorced from the cost of care. Is there anything else we buy — from big-ticket items like cars and appliances to necessities like food and clothing to discretionary items like sports tickets and air fares — where we don’t comparison price shop or weigh our infinite wants against our more limited resources?

With their fingers in their ears and their voices chorusing “la-la-la-la-la,” the Democrats are on the verge of passing a health care bill opposed by a majority of Americans.  They’ll pay for it in November, of course, but the damage will be done.  Republicans will bravely talk about repeal, but entitlement programs will end only when the government runs out of other people’s money.

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