Balancing cost and coverage is analogous to balancing weight loss and deep-fried Twinkies: you can have one or the other.

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When the book is written on the first decade of the 21st century, it will read that it was a time when grave challenges were met by unserious men.  
 
For the past 10 years, Americans have increasingly come to feel that theirs is a government populated either by the incompetent or the dishonest. At the turn of the millennium, the threat of radical Islam alternated between being systematically ignored or serially downplayed.  When September 11 made the gravity of that threat irrefutable, the response nestled itself in the psychologically comfortable but strategically untenable notion that the conflict could be won through limited wars of minimal inconvenience.  And today this politics of wishing continues with every diplomatic conclave that is touted as the first step towards disarming Iran or North Korea.
 
On the domestic front, a similar resistance to hard truths has become ascendant.  Federal spending has exploded while politicians cling to pledges of no new taxes.  Lost somewhere in the morass, apparently, is the reality that the resulting deficits are de facto taxes, with interest thrown in for good measure.  A few years ago, efforts at Social Security reform were stalled when opponents claimed there was nothing structurally unsound in America’s entitlement programs – a claim that could have been made with equal integrity about the levee system in New Orleans.  
 
The latest – and perhaps most shameless – entrant into this pageant of fictions is the healthcare reform being touted by President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress as the elixir for what ails the nation.  Since it is Obama’s want to be the ne plus ultra of all that is appealing and all that is deceptive in American politics, it should come as no surprise that his plan is superlative both in its ambition and its shunning of reality.
 
The headline of a New York Times article earlier this week – “Democrats Try to Balance Cost and Coverage in Health Plan” – provided ample testimony to the fact that Americans are once more being tied to the mast of either ignorance or duplicity.  Balancing cost and coverage is analogous to balancing weight loss and deep-fried Twinkies: you can have one or the other.   
 
Bringing millions of previously uninsured (or, in the conveniently nebulous terminology of liberalism, “underinsured”) Americans into the market will cost money.  This is a fact so elementary that it would not bear saying were it not for the fact that it has eluded a plurality of the United States Congress.  If there was one definitive moment when liberalism ceased to be a serious intellectual movement, it was the day when its apostles became flummoxed by the notion that goods and services cost money.
 
The fuzzy thinking and/or deception is ubiquitous.  The “public option” is said to compete on a level playing field with private insurers – but what entity ever competes fairly in a market that it regulates? Employees are told that they can keep their health insurance if they like it.  Yet employers – the individuals who actually make decisions about purchasing insurance coverage – will see massive incentives to dump their employees’ care if the proposed legislation passes.  In a program sold on “choice,” the federal government will dictate the coverage standards for health insurance and fine or imprison individuals who refuse to buy a plan.  In a framework supposedly rooted in competition, American citizens will still be prohibited from buying insurance across state lines. 
 
Barack Obama is clearly a man who yearns for historical transcendence. Yet by embracing prevarications he finds himself firmly in league with the sort of mediocre leaders who are confident in the American people’s ability to choose them for elected office but not to consider the honest trade-offs inherent in complicated issues.  If that trend continues, he should expect the lack of respect to be reciprocated.