It didn’t take long. As the President performed his Obamacare victory dance, analysis of the facts came quickly on its heels. Obamacare has been a web of lies from the outset. Keep your doctor, keep your plan, we’ll insure the 30 million uninsured, save $2,500 a year in premiums, health care costs will go down. So far none of it has been even remotely true.
The ever-changing CBO estimates illuminate the actuality of Obamacare as does the experience of folks like me. My business saw a 15% increase in premium costs and a doubling of deductibles and out-of-pocket expense. Mr. President, please send me my $2,500!
Potentially four million of the 7.1 million the President crowed about were already insured, displaced and then reinsured. Medicare and Medicaid sign ups that would have occurred anyway are also counted in the 7 million. The real number to focus on is that less than one million previously uninsured are now insured. We’ve spent four years and billions of dollars to insure less than one million previously uninsured Americans. Our Democratic friends pulled out all the stops: ads, tweets, fund raising, union mobilization, used car salesmanship by the President, as if that were the only issue on the horizon. We could have insured those one million directly for a lot less than what we’ve wasted (oops, spent).
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Senator Dick Durbin have over the past few days finally told the truth about what Obamacare was really about. Durbin was direct in stating that health care needed to be ripped away from the private sector. One must imagine that Senator Durbin reached the calculus that the current level of corruption is better than the past level of corruption.
Emanuel told us it was a plan to kill off private insurance companies. If they are successful, in the foreseeable future, the only “solution” to Obamacare will be a single payer, 100% government-controlled health care system. That is what this has been about from the outset.
The silver lining here may be that Democrats will be emboldened to get behind Obamacare now that it has “hit” its false goal: to run on it, to support it, to embrace it. If they do, they will fail — and for a number of reasons. First among them is the demonstrable cascade of repetitive lies. Republicans will have to specifically communicate to voters that the worst of it is yet to come despite the arbitrary delays imposed by the President for purely political reasons. Millions more will, after the election, see the same dynamics that the individual market saw: cancelled policies, increases in cost, doubling of out-of-pocket expenses, and a major bailout to the insurance industry. Remember that early justifications were that the individual market was “only a small percentage of the overall insurance market.”
So what should the questions put to Democratic candidates be? Here are several:
- If Obamacare is the boon you told us it would be why the nearly 40 delays and exemptions?
- If it was a great idea why not accelerate its provisions?
- Did you read he bill and decide that Obamacare was a good idea, or did you fail to read it and vote for it out of pure political considerations.
- What about the money taken from Medicare? What about the attempt to kill off Medicare Advantage?
- What about the death panels?
It’s tragically ironic that when Rep. Alan Grayson from Florida took to the floor of the House to represent the Republican health care plan as “die quickly” he was actually defining the intentions and the results of Obamacare.
