Fighting to Stop an Entitlement Before It Takes Hold, and Expands

By JOHN HARWOOD, NYT

WASHINGTON — Underlying fierce Republican efforts to stop President Obama’s health care law and the White House drive to save it is a simple historical reality: Once major entitlement programs get underway, they quickly become embedded in American life. And then they grow.

That makes the battle over the Affordable Care Act more consequential than most Washington political fights. “If it’s in place for six months, it will be impossible to repeal it or change it in ways that significantly reduce the benefits,” said Robert D. Reischauer, a Democrat who used to lead the Congressional Budget Office.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, another former C.B.O. director, reflects the concern of fellow Republicans in framing the stakes more dramatically. Either the law’s health insurance exchanges “can’t cut it,” he explained, or “it’s Katie, bar the door — we have an explosively growing new program.”

Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, the dominant pattern for major entitlements — the term for government assistance programs open to all who qualify and not subject to annual budget constraints — has been durability and expansion. That is the record Senator Ted Cruz of Texas refers to in warning Republicans not to allow Americans to become “hooked on the subsidies” — an argument Mr. Obama sarcastically recast as, “We’ve got to stop it before people like it too much.”

(More here.)