A Fiendish Plan

If you wanted to implement a single-payer health care plan in the largest economy in the world, how would you do it? If you try to directly mandate it by law, the opposition party will stonewall and block it, as they do every one of your plans.

So what you do is: you take their plan, and implement it in a way that looks plausible. But, along the way, you let them sabotage it, so it won't work well -- mostly for the people who vote for them, which those voters probably won't notice, but your voters will. And you let them fulminate about how horrible your plan (which used to be their plan) is, and how they're going to replace it with something better, as soon as they can figure out what that is.

Let them stew for several years, as they flounder around looking for an alternative. They won't find one on their side of the political divide: you already did their best plan. So, eventually, they'll find a way to claim that single-payer is "efficient" and the "fiscally responsible" thing to do, and start demanding that.

You then act like you're trying to block them, but eventually you're "forced" to give in. And they triumphantly create the thing you wanted in the first place, and claim a huge victory over the now-tainted plan that has your name on it. You lose the name in the history books, but you win by getting what you really wanted all along.


Obama is not this sneaky -- probably no one in the world is this sneaky -- but I find it amusing.