From Awful to Worse: Harry Reid's medical malpractice

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats long ago gave up any pretense of working to rationally reform American health care. The exercise now underway in the Senate is a mad dash to get to 60 votes, and nothing more. That's why some Democratic senators who had no idea exactly what is in the "breakthrough deal" announced by majority leader Harry Reid last week immediately hailed it as a milestone. They're for anything that creates a sense of "momentum" and "inevitability."

But the substance does matter. If Congress passes something in the end, ordinary Americans know they will have to live with it. And from those voters' points of view the latest effort to strike a compromise among Senate Democrats would, based on press reports of what it involves, take the horrendous bill offered by Reid earlier this month and make it even worse.

In most ways, the new proposal is as terrible as Reid's original bill. It would spend hundreds of billions on a new entitlement even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers at a time of high unemployment, squeeze money out of Medicare without fixing the program, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today and pay even higher premiums.

But in one crucial respect, the new proposal is far worse than the last one.

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