Even liberal pundits are admitting that the ACA emporer has been naked for some time:
It's getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act. The latest blow to Democratic candidates, liberal activists, and naïve columnists like me came Monday from the White House, which announced yet another delay in the Obamacare implementation.
I'm not a conservative, and I'll never be a Republican. But the ACA was one of the few times I agreed with Republican doomsayers. Ron Fournier's op-ed reads like a laundry list of all the problems Republicans were pointing out from the beginning:
The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation.
Anybody remember the photos of Nacy Pelosi laughing loudly while she paraded down the street carrying an outsize gavel, on her way to passing the bill? Anybody remember Deem and Pass? Anybody remember the President saying the American people "don't care about the process" used to ram the legislation down our throats?
The entire legislative process was down. right. creepy.
For the second time in a year, certain businesses were given more time before being forced to offer health insurance to most of their full-time workers.
Meanwhile, ordinary Joes and Janes have to buy insurance- or else. Premiums sky high, gov't subsidies too low? Too bad, J. Q. Citizen. Pay up. Oh, but you, Mr. Businessman- you who sit on cash, refuse to create jobs, and threaten to replace workers with robots- you, dear Businessman, can avoid paying.
Maybe indefinitely.
It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point—"If you like your health plan, you'll be able to keep your health plan." And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.
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Then officials started fudging numbers and massaging facts to promote implementation, nothing illegal or even extraordinary for this era of spin. But they did more damage to the credibility of ACA advocates.
Republicans predicted from the first that Obamacare would cause layoffs, reductions in worker hours and force plans and physicians to dump patients.
And they were absolutely right.
Defending the ACA became painfully harder when online insurance markets were launched from a multi-million-dollar website that didn't work, when autopsies on the administration's actions revealed an epidemic of incompetence that began in the Oval Office and ended with no accountability.
In a era when 20-something kids can put together massively successful products like Facebook- or bring the NSA to it's knees using "off the shelf" technology to steal secrets- this is inexcusable.
The ACA does not work because it cannot work. And it cannot work because it was junk policy to start with.Any law that purports to give all Americans access to health care purely by forcibly extending health insurance is destined to fail.
Health insurance is not the problem. It's just a symptom.
Time to start looking at the actual problem.
(Some of my other thoughts on Obamacare can be found here, here and here.)
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