RUTHFULLY YOURS

A health spending plunge coincides with the new law’s launch.

Financial markets shrugged off Wednesday’s punch-in-the-stomach report that first quarter GDP shrank by 2.9% on an annual basis, far more than earlier estimates and the worst quarterly decline in five years. Optimists blame the weather and point to faster growth in the current quarter, which is reasonable but still shouldn’t overlook ObamaCare’s role in nearly sending the economy back into recession.

January saw the formal launch of the Affordable Care Act, and its attempt to transform U.S. health insurance and medical practice. So it’s notable that a major cause of the sharp downward revision in first-quarter GDP was a decline in consumer spending on health care. Lower exports and investment also played a role, but the overall decline in health spending from the previous quarter was a startling 6.4%.

Health spending is nearly always a positive contributor to GDP, and in the fourth quarter of 2013 it contributed 0.62%. But health spending fell so sharply in the first quarter that it subtracted 0.16% from economic growth. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculates GDP, hadn’t been able to capture the magnitude of the health spending decline in its two previous estimates of first quarter growth.

The decline is especially shocking given that the arc of health spending is always up. The explanation can’t be that Americans suddenly had less demand for health care, or had a healthier winter. Our guess is that the turmoil caused by the disastrous ObamaCare rollout confused many consumers into delaying their health purchases. ObamaCare also caused millions of Americans to lose insurance they liked, and it no doubt took time for many to find new policies that suited them and they could afford.

Senator Rand Paul wrote an essay for The Wall Street Journal last week, “America Shouldn’t Choose Sides in Iraq’s Civil War,” in which he associated his attitude toward overseas interventions with the foreign-policy principles of Ronald Reagan. “Though many claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan on foreign policy,” Sen. Paul wrote, “too few look at how he really conducted it.” Essentially what this means, Sen. Paul continued, is that “Like Reagan . . . we should never be eager to go to war.”

The Kentucky Republican doubts that Reagan would have committed U.S. troops to driving out Saddam Hussein, as President George W. Bush did. And he strongly implies that Ronald Reagan, like the senator, would not want to involve the U.S. in Iraq’s current catastrophe.

To support the similarity between his views and Reagan’s, Sen. Paul cites the Weinberger Doctrine as a summary of the 40th president’s views on foreign interventions. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, articulated what came to be known as the Weinberger Doctrine in a November 1984 speech at the National Press Club.

As accurately summarized by Sen. Paul, Weinberger said the U.S. shouldn’t commit combat forces unless America’s vital interests are involved, should do so only if we intend to win, have clear political and military goals, the capacity to achieve them, the support of Congress and the U.S. public, and act only as a last resort. Sen. Paul wants his readers to believe that Weinberger’s view was Reagan’s view.

As he prepares for his all-but-certain presidential run in 2016, Sen. Paul seems to have decided that he needs to refine his—and his father’s—reputation for non-interventionist absolutism. A Washington Post-ABC poll this week suggests that U.S. attitudes toward intervention are in flux, and a center may be re-forming over how much global disintegration the public is willing to accept.