Premature predictions

Pardon us for our lack of conformity, but we feel compelled to pose this question: Is it possible that the healthcare law is not quite as significant a piece of legislation as is being touted so far and wide?

Perhaps we’re naive, but it seems to us likely that the law is neither the savior its proponents contend, nor the disaster its opponents believe it to be.

The legislation certainly has prompted rhetoric, on both sides, that epitomizes hyperbole.

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina called the law “the civil rights act of the 21st century.”

Health insurance is a nice  benefit, to be sure.

But it hardly compares with being able to register to vote without fear of intimidation, and to sit wherever you want to on a bus.

Republican Rep. John Boehner, meanwhile, deemed the bill’s passage as, simply, “armageddon.”

That’s a pretty harsh way to describe legislation designed to ensure Americans can go see a doctor when they feel sick.

In reality this legislation — at least the provisions that will take effect before 2013 — imposes several meaningful but not quite revolutionary changes on the health insurance system.

And some of those changes, including banning insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, are ones that have considerably more bipartisan support than the bill as a whole.

The aspects that are either more controversial or more expensive (or both, in most cases) are pushed far into the future and likely to be tinkered with before they take effect.

Will the federal government actually fine people who fail to buy health insurance? Will 32 million Americans who lack insurance now have it by 2019?

We don’t know. And because we don’t, it’s awfully premature for anybody to brand this bill as either the source of America’s salvation or the seed of its destruction.