what's left of health reform: "trite extensions of what we've been doing for decades"

From Holman Jenkins in the WSJ...

Someday this country will have a health-care debate that's not abject in its idiocy...

President Barack Obama made a "public option" his centerpiece not because it's the answer to what's broken in the U.S. system, but because it's a halfway house to a single-payer setup that liberal Democrats have always wanted. Team Obama also knew the public is concerned about rising costs, so they jammed together a hooey-filled argument that the public option was somehow the solution to rising costs....The public is not as dumb as it's made out to be, and Mr. Obama's public option died a bipartisan death yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee. What's left is a package of "reforms" that are mere trite extensions of what we've been doing for decades. That is, piling up mandates on private insurers and then lying that this somehow isn't driving up the cost of health insurance; piling up subsidies for health consumption and then lying that this somehow isn't responsible for runaway health-care spending....

A few brave legislators, including Democrat Ron Wyden, are willing to say as much. But as Max Baucus put it in an unguarded comment to the Washington Post: "Basically the president is not helping."

Mr. Obama may be "not helping" because he doesn't understand or believe in the role of absent price tags in creating our current woes. He may genuinely favor a system in which government decides who will receive what care.

However, he's certainly also "not helping" because his base in organized labor doesn't want real reform. Union members not only like the tax-free, open-ended health-care benefits they're used to getting....