I was thinking this week about a conversation from George Orwell’s 1984, in a scene you may remember, where Winston Smith is being tortured by government officials. They promise him they will stop if only he will say that two plus two equals five. And he realizes, in that moment, that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

I have written and spoken repeatedly regarding President Obama’s health care law not as an instrument of reform, but an instrument of authority. It is a law designed to take authority from the people, the providers, the insurers and the states and vest it centrally in Washington, D.C. in those houses of ill-repute – the cubicle farms of bureaucracy.

While there are many good people within those halls, there are also others who are not so good. Bent only on expanding their own authority and budget, maximizing the scope of their offices, these bureaucrats seek power for power’s sake. The president and his allies have strengthened these people enormously through their vague mishmash of a health control law.

Now, however, these bureaucrats face a major problem – particularly their current leader, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The storyline that is taking shape is obvious to us all: companies who are currently in the insurance business, such as Principal Financial, are doing the math and discovering it no longer makes sense for them to be in this game – even as other companies do the math and find that why, it makes so much more sense to shift retirees and current employees off our books and onto the taxpayer dole.

This would not be a major problem, of course, except that the whole of the Reid-Pelosi-Sebelius-Obama solution to health care reform was based on the idea that two plus two equals five – that if we believe it hard enough and shame people into agreeing that it does, it will make it so.

Yet this is not the way policy works. It is not the way the real world works. So this week Sebelius announced, in the aftermath of awful news stories about 3M and McDonalds, that she would grant a waiver to thirty different companies to avoid compliance with the new law. With the wave of a hand, the P.R. problem vanishes – at least, for the moment.

This is hardly the only example of banana republic-style governance. The volunteer bureaucrats within the the U.S. preventive task force learned this week of the new unprecedented range of their powers thanks to a report from the Congressional Research Service. You recall the controversy earlier this year in reaction to their recommendations that insurers not pay for certain mammograms as needless and unnecessary? Thanks to Obama’s law, these recommendations are now edicts that must be carried out by insurers, and require an act of Congress to be overruled.

These stories raise the real question of whether we are to be a nation of laws, or a nation of bureaus — one run by the people, or one run by unelected faceless agencies, equipped with unprecedented power. It’s something Obama and his ever-shrinking brain trust have answered unequivocally — it’s the change they intended, after all. And at this moment, their word is law.

But this isn’t over. We still can fight back. We still can speak out. And the bureaucratic true believers in Washington are stuck with a hard, unavoidable truth: we still live in a nation free enough for people to say out loud that two plus two does not equal five.

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Several state legislators have reached out to me recently with questions about the nature of severability and Obamacare. Since some folks seem to have questions as well, I thought I’d explain a bit about what this means.

Most laws of large size and scope have something called a “severability clause” attached to them. Essentially, this means that if one part of a piece of large legislation is ruled unconstitutional by a court, that unconstitutional portion is “severed” from the rest of the bill — the ruling doesn’t stop the rest of the law from being enforced.

The trouble for Obamacare is that it doesn’t have a severability clause. If you’re an opponent of Obamacare, this all sounds pretty good — it indicates that if Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is successful in his Virginia case against the individual mandate, the entire legislation could collapse. But the answer isn’t that simple.

As I discuss with Maureen Martin in our latest podcast, what’s more likely is that the Supreme Court would just eliminate the portions of the bill which are tied directly to the individual mandate.

Some people have claimed the severability clause is absent from Obamacare because the writing process of the bill was such a cluster, the clause was just forgotten. But the reality, I’m told, is that a severability clause would’ve been added in conference between the House and Senate. Except that as you know, no such conference happened — everything had to be done via reconciliation after the House passed the Senate bill. Hence, no severability clause.

But the lack of a severability clause wouldn’t necessarily result in the overrule the rest of the legislation, which mostly have to do with spending and rationing — the expansion of Medicaid, Medicare cuts, and sweeping regulatory authority — and isn’t wrapped up in the mandate. This has been the Court’s approach to other issues, such as the recent Sarbanes-Oxley ruling, another law which lacked a severability clause, where they invalidated a portion of the law and allowed the rest to stand.

Some things that the Court would likely leave unaffected would include the expansion of Medicaid, reporting obligations for businesses and hospitals, expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, funds for “family planning,” expansion of state aging and disability resource centers, expanded funding for prevention programs and workplace education, reforms to inpatient rehabilitation and hospices, the addition of value-based payments for physicians and hospitals, and many provisions relating to Medicare services in rural areas… And that’s just for starters. The point is that the overwhelming portion of this legislation is not tied directly to the individual mandate.

Yet even if the Court behaved in the same way when deciding the constitutionality of the individual mandate, in practical terms, judging the mandate unconstitutional would set off a domino effect throughout the insurance industry. The mandate is the only thing which made other anti-market regulatory demands (such as guaranteed issue and community rating) workable for the industry. Despite Howard Dean’s argument that the individual mandate is unimportant (the reality is that Dean agrees with me — people will simply game the mandate) in the larger scheme of things, removing it and leaving other requirements intact would bring the entire insurance industry to the point of collapse.

So even if the lack of a severability clause doesn’t turn out to matter, elimination of the individual mandate as unconstitutional will create an untenable situation for insurers and eliminate many of the aspects of the legislation President Obama has touted. The push for further reform, at that point, would be inevitable.

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>> I got a little heat when I raised the issue a few months back, but no one should be surprised that now the nomination belongs to McCain, the MSM is crowing about the Natural Born Citizen issue.  Personally, I doubt that the Senate bill will resolve anything – there will still be a lawsuit about this at some point – but it is nice to occasionally be called clairvoyant.  It happens rarely enough for me outside of NFL predictions.