How do you spell "Chutzpah"?

I spell it “O-b-a-m-a.” (Alternate spellings include: R-e-i-d, and P-e-l-o-s-i, though the latter is dialect). The Democrats’ plan to use health care to extend goMvernment’s control over the lives of Americans is in trouble. So the President betakes himself to the White House PR room in which Charles Gibson works (code name ABC News) and he tells people, with a straight face, that if Congress does not pass health care legislation that will bring down costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.”

Gosh. While you ponder what that might mean, absorb what follows: “If we don’t pass it,” quoth the leader of the formerly free world, “here’s the guarantee — your premiums will go up, your employers are going to load up more costs on you. Potentially they’re going to drop your coverage, because hey just can’t afford an increase of 25 percent, 30 percent in terms of the costs of providing health care to employees each and every year. ”

What’s missing from this story? Here’s a question to get you started: Why have insurance premiums been rising so rapidly? (Hint in the form of three additional questions: 1. Why can’t the 1300-plus health insurance companies compete nationwide to provide consumers with real choice? 2. Why do we allow states to insist that insurance companies cover bogus services (acupuncture, dietitians, pastoral counselors, hair prostheses, port wine stain elimination (!), etc. By the way, I minute no opinion about the worthiness of these activities — I could use a port wine stain eliminator from time to time myself. I only wonder whether providing insurance coverage for such activities is really a good idea.) 3. Tort reform — that is legislation that makes it more difficult for lawyers to exploit sick people by suing doctors who try to help them.) [UPDATE: as many comments point out, “port wine stain elimination” does not refer to the removal of stain left by a spilled beverage. So let’s leave that useful service — both of them: stain and birth-mark removal — out of account and concentrate on the crazy mandates that some states require of insurance companies.]

That’s a start, but only a start. Something else that needs to be stressed is that medical care is not a right. It is a service. When your toilet breaks, you call a plumber. He comes and fixes it. Then he gives you a bill. Why should it be different when you break your arm? Of course, we live in a compassionate society: if you break your arm and go to a hospital emergency room you will be treated even if you haven’t got a sou (or a euro). What if it is something more serious? That’s where insurance should come in.

The ABC item I link to reports that: “The president said that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid are on an ‘unsustainable’ trajectory and if there is no action taken to bring them down, ‘the federal government will go bankrupt.'” Well, well. The trajectory probably is unsustainable. But what he doesn’t say is that the Democratic plan will be 1) wildly more expensive and 2) will provide vastly less quality coverage. What it will also assuredly do — and here I’ll “guarantee” something — is put the government in charge of more of your life and (an added “feature,” as in “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”) it will also give you markedly less choice in your own health care decisions.

What is it about Obama that makes these little colloquies so objectionable? I think it is the combination of earnestness, on the one hand, and patent mendacity on the other.I may have lost track, but I suspect the last big truth he told was back in the campaign when he promised that he was only a few days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He wasn’t joshing. Do you like what you see?