Jennifer Rubin on Waiting for Obama's "Magic Trick"

How do you cut waste, fraud and abuse and prevent rationing and expand "coverage" with an enormous new government program? Jennifer Rubin wonders. Her conclusion is that you can't, and that when the President claims he can, he's lying.

But in their frustration at the president’s vacuity, the Post editors overlook a key problem. There isn’t a way to do the things he has promised (avoid adding to the deficit and slow down health-cost inflation) with the sort of government-run system Obama is wedded to. You can’t do it unless you massively ration care, which, if we have learned anything in the past month, is not going to be an easy sell to the public. If you want to try to do these things, you can’t get there through a government-centric plan. What may get there is expanding the health-care insurance market, spurring individual health-insurance purchases, and real tort reform.

So it is not as if Obama is holding out on us or has some super-duper solution tucked in Larry Summers’s filing cabinet. The answer is that there isn’t any answer. Obama will either have to lie about the financial ramifications of the plan he is pushing and run roughshod over the CBO and private analysts, or he’ll have to try another sort of health-care reform. If his speech this past week is any guide, I’m betting he’ll lie.