Think Again: Health Care Promises, Predictions, and Propaganda

Following the passage of President Barack Obama's historic health care reform this week The New York Times' conservative pundit Ross Douthat argues that "liberals have made a lot of predictions about what its passage will mean for America--for our health care system and our health, our economy and our long-term solvency. It will be interesting, to put it mildly, to see if they end up coming true." Per usual, the man has a point. Will health care save money? Will it save lives? Will it cut the deficit? "Right now, these assumptions are hotly contested between left and right," Douthat accurately assumes. "Evaluating these predictions is like groping in the dark. But passing the bill will shed some light on them," and "by 2018 we'll find out who's right."

His colleague, David Brooks, also a conservative, predicts its failure. "This legislation," he writes, speaking of deficits, "was supposed to end that asphyxiating growth, which will crowd out investments in innovation, education and everything else. It will not." Brooks admits that any prediction regarding the bill is dicey. "Nobody knows how this bill will work out. It is an undertaking exponentially more complex than the Iraq war..."

Well, if that's the case, then conservatives really should think twice about making predictions. The Wall Street Journal editors argue that despite the more than 200 Republican amendments accepted by the majority before the bill was finally passed, "this hour of liberal political victory is a good time to adapt the 'Pottery Barn' rule that Colin Powell once invoked on Iraq: You break it, you own it."

It's funny that these conservatives keep throwing around the metaphor of Iraq given their famous inability to get any of their predictions right about that war.

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