Paging Dr. Adams

Arguing in defense of a troop of British garrison soldiers on trial for firing into a crowd of violent Bostonians in 1770, a young and ambitious lawyer named John Adams famously reminded a hostile colonial jury that "facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The soldiers had, Adams argued, acted in self defense when a mob of hundreds of taunting dock workers and teenagers assaulted a sentry with clubs and pelted his comrades with ice and oyster shells. Despite populist anger throughout the colonies, and newspaper headlines decrying a "Boston Massacre," Adams won the case, and the soldiers went free.

Two and a half centuries later, facts are still stubborn things. Somebody kindly remind liberal Democrats crusading for public health care.

In the wake of August's town hall protests and Barack Obama's collapsing job approval polls, his core constituency is sounding a bit rattled, as if they can't quite comprehend the sudden outburst of anger provoked by Congress' attempt to pass a trillion-dollar health care overhaul this summer.

November 2008 was the month of murky nostrums about that most meaningless of political rallying cries, change. August 2009 was the month those vague promises of change crystallized into tangible alterations to our society. The transition was sobering, and bewildering, for Democrats who interpreted their electoral victory as a mandate to enact radical reforms, rather than a warning of what happens to dominant political parties that stray too far from the American mainstream.

None of which is to say health care reform has run aground and foundered. With so much of his dwindling political capital invested in this fight, I expect Obama and his congressional allies will salvage some sort of reform, probably in the form of new regulation for the insurance industry, and maybe more. But liberals' cornerstone reform, a publicly run insurance plan open to all, is in actual doubt for the first time since Obama came to office. Democrats everywhere are waking up in cold sweats from nightmares that it's 1994 all over again, when another young, charismatic Democratic president's campaign for public health insurance failed and ushered in 12 years of Republican congressional majorities.

So I suppose certain liberals can be forgiven if at the moment their defenses of ObamaCare sound a little strained. But what I will not under any circumstances forgive are arguments in favor of a gradual government takeover of an entire industry that rest on completely false premises.

So far, my favorite such argument is, hands-down, that presented last Wednesday by Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's token liberal op-ed writer (who never answered my e-mail from last year). Health care must be provided by government, Frank bluntly asserts, because health is a "public good," not some sort of individual condition controlled by individuals. After pointing out that many of the present problems with health care in this country stem from government meddling and (incredibly) using that as an argument for more government meddling, Frank lectures his readers thusly:

"One reason government got involved is that our ancestors understood something that escapes those who brag so loudly about their prudence at today's town-hall meetings: That health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year's flu have demonstrated."

To quote Kim Jong Il: "Oh reary?"

Because a quick trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells a different story. Per the "National Vital Statistics Report" for 2007, the 10 leading causes of death in America were:
1) heart disease
2) malignant neoplasms (aka cancer)
3) cerebrovascular disease (which leads to stroke, and is often caused by hypertension)
4) chronic lower respiratory disease (usually associated with smoking)
5) accidents
6) Alzheimer's Disease
7) diabetes
8) influenza and pneumonia
9) nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis
10) septicemia

I can't help but notice that not until number 8 on the list do you encounter a cause of death that can spread from one person to another, as implied by Frank's unsupported claim that "the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us." I also can't help noticing that the major causes of death are largely linked to lifestyle choices, and have no interpersonal properties whatsoever. You can't exactly catch my heart disease, whether or not a politician in Washington decrees that you must pay my medical bills.

I know full well such observations won't change the minds of collectivists like Thomas Frank, whose stated objective is the creation of a new entitlement that permanently yokes our physical health to the tender mercies of government. But I'm chalking this one up as a small victory for stubborn facts nonetheless.