Costly health reform fixation

President Obama, in a Saturday visit to Capitol Hill, urged House Democrats to pass sweeping health care reform today not for him or their party but "for the American people," adding: "They're the ones who are looking for action right now."

Actually, polls since last summer have shown the American people looking at ObamaCare with rising and justified alarm. And the president's misplaced fixation on forcing it upon us has diverted Washington's attention from our most pressing economic challenge -- a grimly high unemployment rate that only recently dipped out of double figures.

Thus, House members working through the weekend will cast showdown reform votes today. According to various media outlets, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to have the numbers she needs.

Yet due to opposition from not just all Republican members but a significant number of Democrats, such a victory would come by a slim margin -- and via a convoluted legislative process. The Washington Post reported Saturday that the House will take three votes -- "first, on a resolution that will set the terms of debate; second, on a package of amendments to the Senate bill that have been demanded by House members; and third, on the Senate bill itself."

So much for Mr. Obama's frequently stated 2008 campaign promise of forging bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems.

And while he and Democratic leaders in Congress persist in claiming that their reform plan will reduce the federal deficit, they ignore the job-killing consequences of the tax hikes it would impose.

In a Thursday letter to House leaders, an executive for Caterpillar Inc. predicted that if the bill becomes law, the company's health insurance tab would rise by more than $100 million within a year due to "substantial cost burdens."

Another letter, from more than 130 economists, to the president and assorted lawmakers also warns that the reform bill would stifle new hiring and even force layoffs.

Meanwhile, a group of state attorneys general, including South Carolina's Henry McMaster, plans to file a federal lawsuit against the reform bill if it becomes law. They contend that its requirement that all Americans have some form of health insurance violates the Constitution.

As for that latest Congressional Budget Office projection of the reform legislation facilitating long-term deficit reduction, it's primarily achieved through the far-fetched assumption of Medicare "savings." As an analysis in Friday's Washington Post, hardly an anti-ObamaCare hotbed, put it, "the sheer complexity of the legislation" renders that assumption, and that estimate, as questionable at best. From that analysis:

"The proposal on the table contains sweeping changes that would touch almost all corners of the health care system, and the changes interrelate in hard-to-predict ways. For example, the legislation contains subsidies for those who would not be able to afford health coverage on their own -- but the cost of those subsidies could vary a lot depending on how much other elements of the legislation change the price of health insurance, such as through provisions requiring minimum coverage levels."

In other words, don't count on that "deficit reduction."

And don't count on today's House votes -- or the looming Senate filibuster-dodging gimmick of "reconciliation"-- to end the divisive debate on this issue.

This unseemly, revealing exercise in hardball politics makes a mockery of Mr. Obama's campaign pitch that he would work across party lines. In his quest to transform one-sixth of the U.S. economy at all costs, he has widened, not narrowed, our nation's partisan divisions.