When the Supreme Court ruled that President Obama’s sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system was constitutional, about the only thing critics and supporters could agree on was the historic importance of the legislation itself. But if history is any guide, there will be one other inescapable truth: The Affordable Health Care for America Act of 2010 will generate the same unintended consequences that have shaped, distorted, and even perverted so many other important pieces of legislation in our nation’s history.
Whether tackling social security, veterans’ benefits, civil rights or immigration reform, Congress has demonstrated over the past 75 years that when it addresses significant social issues with complicated legislation, the results will, more often than not, vary dramatically from what was originally intended. In some instances, as in the case of the GI Bill, the impact was broader than the original drafters could have dared to hope. More commonly, as in the case of social security or immigration reform, a small detail has ended up undermining the loftiest goals of the original bill.
A general rule of thumb for determining how likely a bill is to veer off course is to ask how ambitious the legislation is: the more far-reaching, the more likely it is to produce unanticipated consequences. As we saw with health care reform, big, complicated laws are often the product of partisan brokering and compromise that makes their “intent” ambiguous and open to interpretation. That gives enormous power to the government bureaucrats charged with enforcing the law, and to the courts that are inevitably called upon to settle the conflicts. The gap that opens between the bill’s lofty goals and its often haphazard implementation is the breeding ground for unforeseen results.
