Health care needs a series of specific surgeries, not Obama's monument building

President Barack Obama, who announced dramatically before the election that "the transnformation of America begins in five days," now argues, preposterously, that he is only cleaning up the mess left by his predecessor.

Troublle is, George Bush had no particularly troublesome role in health care, the issue that now dominates Washington's attention.

Obama and his Democrat allies point to two aspects of health care as most dire: the steadily rising cost and the absence of coverage for some 45 million people.

Instead of focusing on those aspects, however, Obama has expanded his to-do list to extend coverage to young people, who often rationally choose to forgo insurance. He is doing so to compel young and healthy people to subsidize health caree for everyone else.

Accused by Republicans of secretly planning to extend coverage to illegal alienss, Obama denied it, but then lowered the number of new people to be covered from 45,000 to 30,000, evidence that his original plan was to cover illegals.

Even in the absence of coverage under Obamacare, illegals can be expected to continue their current practice of going to hospital emergency rooms for treatment, where they can not be turned away.

The Obama administration also could attack the problem of rising health care costs directly by proposing tort reform. To protect themslves from potential lawsuits, doctors now practice defensive medicine, performing some tests and procedures largely to assemble a defense against trial lawyers seeking jackpot justice. Defensive medicine drives up health care costs.

But tort reform is unlikely to happen because the Democrat party relies heavily on substantial campaign contributions from trial lawyers. Obama, a lawyer, has shown no discernible interest in tort reform.

Obama has made health care the top priority of his admninistration, notwithstanding the fact that most insured paople are happy with their health care. Bush had little or nothing to do with the problems that Obama is tryng to fix.

Instead of tailoring modest fixes to specific problems, the president has opted for sweeping statements, describing as broken a health care system that patients from all over the world are patronizing in an atempt to get well.

For theatrics, Obama deserves a B+. For governanace, he gets an F.

Politics should be about dealing with real problems, not the building of legislative monuments to oneself.