Conservative critics of Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican finishing his third term, may deprive him of his party’s nomination at a convention on Saturday. Some center-right columnists are appalled. He is one of “the good ones,” writes one of them, “widely respected in Washington.” (The columnist may consider these terms of praise synonymous.) If Bennett loses “because of his willingness to co-sponsor a centrist (in a good way!) health care reform bill,” writes another, “it will be fair to say that the Tea Partiers have hurt their party, and cost the country a good senator.”
Bennett’s defenders note, correctly, that he has voted with conservatives most of the time. But since his rivals would do the same, his voting record does not provide a reason to prefer him to them. Nor does his proven electability: Nobody doubts that his rivals could win a general election in Utah. The case for Bennett is that he reached across the aisle to promote what his defenders consider creative, market-driven health-care legislation.
So the question before Utah Republicans is, in part, whether that legislation reflects well or poorly on the senator’s judgment. On this point we disagree with his fans. Bennett’s bill was not superior to Obamacare. It was worse than it in some respects, but in the crucial respects it was simply identical. Obamacare’s three main elements are regulations that block insurance companies from accurately pricing risk, a requirement that all people buy this irrationally priced product, and subsidies to help some of them do that. Bennett’s legislation featured all three elements.
His legislation would have resulted in lower health spending than Obamacare, and more people would have purchased insurance for themselves rather than through their employers. But the lower spending would largely have been generated by pushing people into HMOs rather than by freeing them to make their own cost-quality trade-offs. And the solution to a decades-long federal policy of encouraging employer provision of health insurance is not a sudden move to a federal policy of prohibiting it.
Bennett’s legislation never received widespread public attention, but if it had it is safe to say that it would have been at least as unpopular as Obamacare proved — and probably less popular. The notion that it could have been a vehicle for heading off Obamacare is a fantasy.
On the most important political issue of the last two years, Bennett was mistaken; and he has not changed his mind (although he did, bizarrely, vote to declare Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional while remaining the co-sponsor of his own mandate-including bill). Perhaps this record does not obligate Utah Republicans to pick someone else. But if they do it should be no occasion for sadness beyond the circle of his friends and family.