Health Care (Reform) Bill

[I]f liberals are right, health care reform will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Not some lives, on the margins, in hard-to-measure ways that may or may not justify the bill’s price tag. Tens of thousands every year. . .

Right now, these assumptions are hotly contested between left and right. But if the bill passes, by 2018 we’ll find out who’s right. . .

[P]assing the bill will shed some light on them.

It will shed light, as well, on all other promises that piled up as the health care vote drew near — that the bill, its implicit abortion subsidies notwithstanding, will actually reduce the abortion rate, as T.R. Reid argued last week in the Washington Post; that it will create 400,000 new jobs “almost immediately,” as Pelosi recently claimed; that it will become more popular once implemented, as every Democrat insists; and so on through an array of happy possibilities.

The same goes for all the things that liberals are sure won’t happen. We’ll find out if the bill makes premiums skyrocket. We’ll find out if it creates doctor shortages. We’ll find out if the array of new taxes destroys more jobs than the new spending creates. We’ll find out if the fiscally essential firewall between the new, heavily subsidized exchanges and the old, less-subsidized employer-based system holds up. And in the (only slightly) longer run, we’ll find out if tacking an entitlement to comprehensive health insurance atop a groaning system speeds America’s rendezvous with a bankrupt, Californian future.

As a conservative, I suspect they’re wrong. But now that the bill has passed, as a citizen of the United States, I dearly hope they’re right. Indeed, I hope that 20 years from now, in an America that’s healthier, richer and more solvent than today, a liberal can brandish this column and say “I told you so.” Because the alternative would mean that we’re all about to be very sorry, and for a very long time to come.