Obamacare is Imploding
By Alan
Caruba
Obamacare—the
Affordable Care Act—is both imploding from its own dead weight and conversely
exploding in the face of the Democratic Party as we head toward the 2014
midterm elections. You remember the Democrats? They were the ones who, on
Christmas Eve 2009 passed Obamacare in the late hours. It’s the bill Nancy
Pelosi told us had to be passed “so we can find out what’s in it.”
The bad
news for Democrats and worse news for Barack Obama is that, since it was signed
into law on March 23, 2010, Americans have had three years to learn what a
total socialist time bomb Obamacare is. If you wanted to destroy the nation’s
economy, you could not have chosen a better way.
The
crescendo of the backlash is slowly mounting. Writing in The Hill on April 6th,
Sam Baker reported that “Delays in implementing popular pieces of Obamacare are
hurting it with Democrats”, referring to policies they believe “could help
build support for the unpopular bill.” Oh? It’s unpopular? Who knew?
For
example, wrote Baker, a key program designed to “help small businesses…won’t be
in place when voters head to the polls next year.” It would have allowed small businesses to
choose from multiple policies for their workers. Obamacare, however, is really
designed to ensure that the only party from whom you can get insurance is the
government.
I
guarantee you that no aspect of Obamacare is going to make it more popular with
any but the brain-dead Democrats who remain clueless about Obamacare.
When 33
Senate Democrats cast a non-binding vote, as they did in March, to repeal the
law’s tax on medical devices, you can be sure that piece of political theatre
was to give them cover, particularly if they will be running for reelection in
2014. Any of the Senators who voted for Obamacare are already in serious
trouble. No Republican Senators voted for it.
The
National Republican Senatorial Committee noted that “People already don’t like
Obamacare, but they’re really not going to like the tax hikes, mandates, fees,
penalties, and added red tape bureaucracy that goes into effect over the next
eight months. It goes from being an abstract discussion to a real life pain.”
One
of my favorite pundits is Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow for entitlement and
budget policy at The Heartland Institute, a national non-profit free market research
organization headquartered in Chicago. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President
Reagan and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the
first President Bush. In early April, Forbes published an article of his, “Look Out Below, The Obamacare Chaos is Coming.”
Ferrara summed
up the dark corner in which the Democrats painted themselves, writing that “The
biggest political problem faced by so-called ‘liberals’ and so-called
‘progressives’ in President Obama’s second term is how to prevent voters from
holding them politically responsible as the public comes to realize how badly
they were lied to during the first Obama term to win passage of Obamacare.”
To call
Obamacare “socialist” is to do it an injustice. It is pure communism. Liberals
and progressives may not be communists (some are), but they are surely the most
deluded political class on planet Earth. No nation that has embraced socialism
has ever enjoyed anything close to the wealth generated by the capitalism that
made the U.S. an economic colossus in the last century. Now, like much of
Europe, we are all deep in debt thanks to socialist programs and policies.
I have
previously written about Obamacare’s many pitfalls. What needs to be revisited
are the many LIES that Obama told in order to get it passed. Indeed, passage
required extensive arm-twisting and bribery among the Democrats who voted for
it. Again, no Republicans voted for it.
Obama said, “If
you like your health insurance, you can keep it. No one is going to take that
away from you”; no one except the many companies who are cutting back on the
number of their employees to avoid being ensnared by it. Others are simply not
hiring for the same reason. Ferrara noted that “individuals as well could just
skip the insurance and pay the penalty at a savings of at least 50% to 75% or
more.”
Since millions
are likely to pursue this option, that will leave millions more uninsured and,
as a bonus for idiotic policy making, it will create what Ferrara calls “a
financial death spiral for private insurers.” Progressives says Ferrara, will
welcome this because it will leave “all health care to be paid for by the
‘single payer’ government.” This is the same government whose Medicare and
Medicaid programs are going broke. That has already been hastened by the way
“almost half of Obamacare is paid for over the next decade by draining $716
billion out of Medicare.”
Voters will be
reminded that it is not Republicans who came up with this, but Democrats. The
result according to the Medicare Office of the Actuaries is that “One out of
seven hospitals will leave Medicare in the next seven years.”
Simple access
to medical care will become a problem as more and more physicians decide to
close their private practices.
About the only
good news is a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation that contends that
Obamacare is unconstitutional because the bill originated in the Senate, not
the House. Under the Origination Clause of the Constitution, all bills raising
revenue must begin in the House.” You’d think that Chief Justice Roberts would
have known that when he cast a vote for it because he deemed Obamacare a tax.
The Supreme Court needs to revisit Obamacare to redeem itself. Obamacare is the “perfect storm” for the Democratic Party. It will swamp them in 2014.
© Alan Caruba,
2013
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