There’s little doubt that the chart next to Rep. Steve King (R., Iowa) above was the most famous illustration to come out of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey wrote, “I take a certain satisfaction in the role a certain chart played in that victory — the chart I created with my staff, depicting the plan’s dozens of new bureaucracies. We captioned it: ‘Simplicity Defined.’ One of Mrs. Clinton’s comments after the defeat of Clinton Care was, ‘We never overcame the chart.’ Bob Dole showcased the memorable spaghetti-like visualization during his 1994 response to President Clinton’s State of the Union address, a powerful cautionary symbol of the sales pitch that preceded it.”
Today, King refers to the old Hillarycare chart regularly in his floor statements, declaring that it “hung on the office in my construction office throughout that entire decade and probably past the change of the millennium. It hung there because it scared the living daylights out of me, as an employer who was providing health insurance for my employees and, of course, my family as well. . . . [This chart] sunk Hillarycare, because the people in this country did not want to create all of this bureaucracy and give all of this control and authority over to the government.”
But the Clintoncare chart may soon be surpassed by the Obamacare chart in attention, scrutiny, and controversy.
When it became clear that another effort would be made at overhauling the nation’s health-care system, House Minority Leader John Boehner and other Republicans asked the Joint Economic Committee to draw up another chart, depicting how the system would work under House Democrats’ draft legislation. Each staff economist was directed to go through the bill, spotlighting new agencies, mandates, and regulations. Then the bill was dissected a second time, line by line, to ensure that all the parts were accurately represented. The result was this:
Needless to say, this panorama of jelly beans on top of a computer’s circuit board isn’t pretty; to the average American, it looks like a labyrinth to navigate before receiving care. Some Obamacare backers claimed that the myriad colors make it seem unnecessarily complex, but there is a method to the seeming madness: The parts in white already exist, and the colored boxes are the new entities, offices, requirements, reports, and subsidies the Democrats’ bill would create.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats objected and sent a letter to the JEC minority staff claiming eight errors. Some of them were laughable. Democrats complained that “according to the chart, the only outflows from the IRS will be to the Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund,” when in fact there’s a red arrow pointing from the IRS to the Department of the Treasury. Similarly, Democrats claimed that “the Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund is depicted as simply a recipient of IRS funds, with no outflow,” when in fact the chart depicts a red line exiting the right side of the HIE Trust Fund that connects to the Treasury Department. Perhaps they should have looked at a larger version.
JEC Republicans did concede one error, that they’d placed the words “families with 4x poverty level” near the Low-Income Subsidy, when it belonged with the health (individual) affordability credit. They noted that if they’d omitted “families with 4x poverty level” entirely, it would have had no impact on the overall structure. When summarizing 1,000 pages, getting a detail wrong is regrettable, but a pretty good batting average.
“The chart first revealed to the public what they long suspected — that the Democrats’ plan would interject an unbelievable bureaucratic mess in between them and their doctor,” says Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), the ranking Republican on the Joint Economic Committee. “It was frightening, and it has helped galvanize middle-class America against the government-run plan.”
Republicans wanted to use the chart in their official mail to constituents — referred to as “franked” or free mail. The three Democrats on the Franking Commission said the GOP could not use it, charging that it was inaccurate. (They are also attempting to ban any franked mail that refers to “government-run health care,” requiring the euphemism “the public option” instead.) While franked mail is supposed to be nonpartisan, no one I spoke to on Capitol Hill, staffer or member, can recall a similar level of censorship in communications with constituents.
At The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation put together
a similarly complicated chart illustrating the current system of providing health care, aiming to reinforce the point that “the U.S. health care system is already a mind-numbing web of institutions, agencies, and businesses. . . . While that may be self-evident to anybody who’s ever had to handle a billing dispute between insurer and hospital, it’s easy to lose sight of that in the scrum of congressional debate.”
Fair enough, but the current system’s complications don’t negate the fact that the House Democrats’ bill would create additional layers of bureaucracy. Beyond that, there’s a matter of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t; as flawed as the current system is, it’s the one Americans are most familiar with dealing with. Everyone comes to the Obamacare version a rookie, with no real sense of how all the moving parts interact.
The new JEC chart has appeared in quite a few media outlets (and if you want a closer look, you can find a PDF here); it’s even been mocked on The Daily Show as “scary-looking, disingenuous health-care reform op-art.” (The fact that it appeared on Fox News was sufficient for Stewart to declare it disingenuous.) Cracking jokes may be sufficient for Jon Stewart; to remake the American health-care system in their own image, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama will need more. Much more.
– Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot for NRO.