To recap, then: Before, during, and after passage, Americans were promised that Obamacare was going to lower premiums for “everyone” (the goal of merely maintaining premiums being too modest); it was not going to interfere with anybody’s health care or health insurance if they already had it; and it was not going change anybody’s patient-doctor relationship. The message was unmistakable: All the government wanted to do was extend health insurance to people who didn’t have it. This wouldn’t affect you. No need to worry. Period. Move along.
In addition to the totally partisan nature of this thing, one of the other many things that distinguishes it from previous entitlements is the many grandiose lies that were told about it to sell it, going back to the president’s first campaign.
OK, call me crazy, and I haven’t looked into this at all. But would anyone be at all surprised if they were selected on how much they filled Democrat campaign coffers rather than track record or competence?
Why is ObamaCare such a hot steaming mess? Because Obama cares more about campaigning than governing (though he does like the part of governing where he can push his political enemies around).
[Update a while later]
The Republicans didn’t sabotage the health exchanges. Obama did.
This train wreck was perfectly predictable, and many predicted it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s ObamaCar.
[Update a while later] USA Today: “…an inexcusable mess.”
“An embarrassment for the administration,” Blitzer stated. “Hopefully, they’ll get all those glitches out of the way by Monday, if possible. They’ve only had three years to get ready for this roll out.”
I find quite bizarre the repeated claims that the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius should somehow end debate on the PPACA and the individual mandate. Did the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding the Hyde Amendment or other limits on federal funding for abortion end debate over the wisdom or fairness of these policies? Of course not — nor should they have. These decisions did not dampen the debate over the underlying constitutional questions either. There is nothing inappropriate about abortion rights groups continuing to challenge these policies, politically and in the courts. By the same token, so long as a substantial portion of the American electorate opposes key elements of the PPACA, we should expect efforts to limit or overturn it. That’s how the system works.
Indeed. There are more cases pending, and if they reach SCOTUS, they may still overturn the law (particularly given the ruling that it is non-severable). It will simply happen on some grounds other than those previously argued. Also, unless Roberts’ decision arose from his being blackmailed (I wish I could be sure that it wasn’t), he probably learned a lesson from it, and won’t pass up another opportunity to strike it.
They can either spur or prevent it. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about this subject, and how so much conventional wisdom, especially about diet, is utterly wrong.
We resent being told how to feel, and we hope ObamaCare fails, spectacularly and quickly.
We hope it fails spectacularly because that would provide an emotionally satisfying dramatic conclusion. If Barack Obama is forced to spend, say, the last two years of his presidency contending with the undeniable failure of his signature initiative, that would be a fitting punishment for the hubris of his first two years, especially since the imposition of ObamaCare on an unwilling country was the main consequence of his hubris.
We hope it fails quickly for an additional reason: to minimize the damage. Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled “Everyone Should Hope Communism Works.” That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn’t work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.
Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. The Post might respond that that’s an argument against communism rather than an argument against hoping communism works. But when you put it that way, it’s not such a clear distinction, is it? The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.
Unfortunately, many still have that emotional interest.
