US Health Care Reform: A Presidency Adrift

Obama’s health care reform fix is the latest proof of incompetency and improvisation.

The “fix” announced by Barack Obama to his health care reform, more important in what it signifies than in its immediate consequences, is the nail in the coffin for a measure that has been running adrift for months, one which has turned history’s most admired president into its biggest disappointment.

Obama’s decision to extend current medical plans by a year is an administrative measure that responds, in turn, to problems of an administrative nature. Ordinarily this decision would not have given rise to such severe censure. However, its repercussions are political and it has become the latest piece of evidence of the incompetence, the improvisation and the confusion of this administration. Journalists reiterate the comparison with Katrina, and Republicans remind us that they had already warned this would be Obama’s Waterloo.

Obama’s authority is crumbling. If he is incapable of pushing through the stellar reform of his own presidency competently, then what is he capable of? His Democrat colleagues, more concerned with their own fortune in the next midterm elections, have begun to abandon him. His popularity is at an all-time low, comparable to George W. Bush around the same time. His despondency and demoralization are visible. His lack of leadership, whether in domestic affairs, the Syrian crisis or in negotiations with Iran, is a cause of concern across all chambers.

His personal prestige, in tatters worldwide thanks to Edward Snowden, is also collapsing at home due to his inability to govern the country. Each television appearance, which formerly served to demonstrate his skills as a speaker, is now an opportunity to corroborate his shortcomings as the leader of the most important nation on Earth. Hesitant, erratic, abstracted: Obama is a shadow of his former self.

What went wrong? For a definitive answer, we’ll presumably be waiting quite some time. Firstly, because with three years left in office Obama still has — on paper, at least — time enough for a resurrection, but also because in Obama’s demise there are numerous personal, political and circumstantial factors at play which make an explanation difficult to come by.

His health reform has been the object of numerous acts of sabotage by Republican governors and has been the target of the fiercest campaign against any legislation for several decades: It has been attacked in Congress, in the media, by businesses, by insurance companies and by the medical profession, from ideological and economic angles.

His health care reform — and Guantanamo, in a different way — was, from the very beginning, proof that Obama would not find an appropriate stage to fulfill his promises. The panic unleashed by Obama’s election in some quarters was immediately transformed into a powerful force of resistance.

But that is no excuse for the feeble response from the White House. The wrath of the opposition, to a certain extent, was to be expected. What was not to be expected was Obama’s inability to combat it. Throughout his first term, that inability was dressed up as cautiousness. A president who sought conciliation, agreement, the middle ground, could not be reproached for making concessions to achieve such goals. But in these early months of his second term, his caution has been exposed as a front for his lack of skills, resources, maybe even convictions. His health care reform fix, which affects one of his most repeated promises — “if you like your current insurance, you can keep that insurance” — encroaches on the final bastion of his presidency: his credibility.