The State of the Union left many Americans unclear about the state of healthcare reform. Was Obama pledging to continue the fight? Proposing a scaled back healthcare bill? Or moving on to more palatable priorities such as tax cuts for the middle class?

 

Regardless of Obama's intentions, a Wall Street Journal editorial written by Daniel Henninger argues that healthcare reform is destined to die. "ObamaCare" is an impossibility because the healthcare system is way too complex, he writes. Take for example the medical device industry, which Henninger says consists of 8616 separate medical device companies. That's just a fraction of the entities that would be affected by any sort of change to the current system—a fraction that is heavily invested in opposing at least some of the reform proposals.  According to Henninger, "Only people who have reduced American healthcare to rows and columns of data in academic studies would think it possible to remake this incredibly sophisticated organism as easily as rebooting a spreadsheet." In his opinion, a healthcare overhaul will fail for the same reason it failed under FDR and Clinton—it's too big to tame.