Obama moving too fast with health-care reform

President Barack Obama wants health-care reform this year.

He said at a town hall meeting the other day that he won't tolerate "endless delay" and that we probably won't reform health care if we don't do it this year.

Now why is that, Mr. President? Will Congress be on vacation for the remaining three years of your term?

Consider that it's not unusual to take a full session of Congress — two years — to pass legislation a fraction of the size and consequence of health-care reform. Yet our president is demanding that a bill to overhaul a $2.5 trillion sector of our economy — one-sixth of it — be considered and passed in a few short weeks.

It ought to be clear that this is not about taking an honest and sincere look at how to make this a better country and how to do a better job at delivering health care to Americans. It's impossible to look at something this massive and deal with it in such a short time frame.

This is about raw politics. When Obama says that if we don't get "it" done this year we probably won't get "it" done, he doesn't mean reforming health care. He means reforming it the way he and Ted Kennedy want to do it. Government-run, nanny-state health care.

To pull it off, they have to move fast.

First, the White House knows that Obama's honeymoon won't last forever. While his personal approval ratings remain high at 60 percent, his disapproval rating — now at 33 percent — is almost twice where it stood last February. And, in the latest Gallup polling, the majority now disapproves of how Obama is handling government spending. So the White House wants action now on health care while their man is still popular.

Second, the White House knows that next year is an election year. It will be far more difficult to get senators and congressmen to play ball.

Third, it knows the big reason Hillary Care failed in 1993 was that the American people were given an opportunity to look at it and consider it. They don't want to make the same mistake of giving voters a chance to actually understand what is about to happen to them. The White House knows that the more Americans have an opportunity to take a look at the bureaucrat-run, nanny-state health-care freight train, the more likely they will jump off the track.

Breathlessness is a great political technique. Telling voters the world will end if we don't get X passed now.

This is how the $800 billion "stimulus" bill got passed earlier this year. We were flashed images of the Great Depression of the 1930s and told our only hope is the stimulus bill.