Congress: Never Having to Say You’re Sorry : The National Health Board would insulate politicians from unpopular decisions.

The Clinton Administration’s original plan for health-care soviets may be dead, but Washington pols are still struggling to assemble bureaucratic body parts into a Frankenstein to carry them across the electoral finish line in November.

Lightning struck in one political laboratory last week when the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee voted 17-0 to piece together a National Health Board to establish a “standard benefits package” for any health proposal. This may have been a small victory for bipartisanship, but it was a big one for the system of simultaneous credit-taking and blame-shifting that Congress has perfected. The board will empower both Democrats and Republicans to say whatever they want about how compassionate (or thrifty) they are, secure in the knowledge that bureaucrats will take the heat for the defects of the ultimate health-care product.

Supporters of the board say it will control costs. But that’s not why Congress created it. The board’s real value is as a diversionary punching bag. Citizens, sick from disease of the body and/or the wallet, will target faceless apparatchiks, not real-live elected officials.

Americans rail against both bureaucrats and Congress, without really comprehending the symbiotic relationship between the two. One who does get it is David Schoenbrod, a professor at New York Law School and author of the new book “Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation.” Schoenbrod argues that Congress writes flabby laws, leaving “hard choices” to unelected bureaucrats. This is great for Congress: It make no enemies, only friends. But democratic accountability suffers. “When the lawmakers we elect have others make the law,” Schoenbrod writes, “the people lose.”

This systemic scam--politicians hiding behind bureaucrats--has allowed Medicare spending to quadruple in the last dozen years. By contrast, the inflation of health-care costs in the private sector has been diminishing, as insurers have squeezed down benefits. Such cost-cutting is easy for business people; they don’t have to win popularity contests. But politicians do, and that means currying favor with those who can give them votes or money. Schoenbrod shows how lawmakers become rainmakers: “Legislators now spend more time soliciting campaign contributions and campaigning for reelection than legislating.”

This delegation is fine with the special interests; they know that the board will be the Potomac equivalent of one-stop shopping. Lobbyists will descend on it like vampires in the night; groups that can’t win their case in the daylight of the free market or public opinion will suck what they want from the American jugular.

All the incentives in Washington are to increase spending. Consider just one controversial issue that Congress will delegate to the Board: coverage for mental health. No rational lawmaker wants to vote “against” the mentally ill, but nobody wants to be on record voting to pay for such expensive coverage, either.

The George Washington University Medical Center has been running ads in the Washington Post arguing for “non-discriminatory inclusion” of mental-health treatment in any plan. The ads say that full treatment for depression would save the nation $35 billion a year in restored productivity. Maybe so. But the mental-health community has every incentive to low-ball cost estimates, since once the program is in place it will be almost impossible to roll back the entitlement, even if the projections turn out to be grotesquely wrong, as they were three decades ago with Medicare.

Consider other candidates for “non-discriminatory inclusion” in the standard-benefits package: post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder, repressed memory of sexual abuse, multiple personalities and “ghetto stress syndrome.” Overnight, special pleaders on behalf of these ailments and more will spring up, all demanding their fair share of the federal pie. And in the final irony, members of Congress will use all their influence on the board to help a favored constituency. That’s right: Congress will lobby its own creation, because the final responsibility will still rest with the board.

The point is not to single out mental health for criticism. One could just as easily predict the income-optimizing advocacy of balding men, shamans, fallen-arch sufferers and Christian Science practitioners.

The point is this: If Washington creates a political football, everybody will toss it around. The National Health Board won’t eliminate politics. It will merely insulate the President and Congress from political consequences.