GOP Health Care 'Victory' Would Be Disastrous

If Republicans topple Barack Obama’s attempts to reform health care, they will have reason to celebrate—if they like plummeting wages, skyrocketing Medicaid and Medicare costs, and angry entrepreneurs, David Frum writes for New Majority, scolding fellow conservatives for naysaying reform. “We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and underperforming system,” writes Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush.

A GOP victory would come at the expense of small-business owners and risk-takers—“exactly the people the Republican Party exists to champion,” Frum notes. “If we win, we’ll trumpet the success as a great triumph for liberty and individualism. Really though it will be a triumph for inertia. To the extent that anybody in the conservative world still aspires to any kind of future reform and improvement of America’s ossified government, that should be a very ashy victory indeed.”
(More David Frum stories.)