Yeah, I know I’ve been harping on ObamaCare for quite a while now, but there’s just so much wrong with it. And I’m not speaking of the website. All I’ll say about that is that the oversight that was given to putting that together is the same oversight you’re likely to see on the program itself. How does that make you feel?

No, the big deal is the fact that what you were sold is not what you’re getting. You were given some promises about this that were repeated over and over.

Well of course no one was saying you’d lose your coverage. Obama couldn’t have sold this particular bill of goods if he’d been honest about it. What we’re getting are millions of Americans whose insurance companies had to—had to—cancel their policies because they didn’t meet ObamaCare’s standards. Yes, you can keep your plan, as long as the government says you can. And then you can’t. Ben Shapiro tweeted, “PolitiFact rated Obama’s ‘If you like your plan, you can keep it’ as ‘half true.’ Which half? ‘If you like it’?”

Oh, and you can keep your doctor, as long as he doesn’t leave the practice, or get laid off from the hospital. There are links in the show notes to stories about how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is, for many Americans, not being very protective in this regard.

And the “affordable” part? Not so much, either. First there was the promise.

And now comes the reality. Supporters of ObamaCare, most notably, are getting acute cases of “sticker shock” as they find out how much their premiums will go up. A writer at the left-wing Daily Kos website was floored that his rates were doubling.

I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.

I don’t know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.

What am I missing?

Well for starters, you’re missing the reality of basic economics. And, as Dave Ramsey says, you’re missing basic math skills. What happening is that non-subsidized premiums are skyrocketing, but even if you get the subsidies, the deductibles are huge, reaching 10-12 thousand dollars. Sure the insurance may be affordable, but the health care is not.

But it’s not even so much the broken promises, so much as it is the fact that they knew, from the start of this awful bill, that they couldn’t keep it. Regulations within the bill itself give an estimate that 40 to 67 percent of customers who bought their own insurance will not be able to keep their policy. That’s an estimate right in the bill.

But Obama kept parroting that promise, and the media kept dutifully reporting it. From the “Now They Tell Us” Department, NBC News now reports this rather important bit of information, now that the bill has passed the Congress and the Supreme Court, and has started signing people up. And this startling revelation was worth a whopping 21 seconds on the NBC Nightly News.

Yeah, you can report on how the administration lied to us, but what about the journalistic malpractice in not doing this digging years ago? I’m looking at all of you, including CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

Why is it that conservatives saws this coming but liberals didn’t? And why were conservatives who pointed this out called “racists” (and still are)? The truth would have benefited conservatives, liberals and independents. But blind partisanship won the day, and we’ve all been dragged into the same pit.

Indeed, dealing with the pre-existing conditions issue and lowering the cost of insurance are admirable goals. But the ObamaCare way of dealing with this is, overall, not the way to do it. The Republicans have had their proposal up on the web for all to see for years; a plan to fix the specific problems without upending the entire industry and forcing government’s choice on the individual.

Filed under: DemocratsDougEconomics & TaxesGovernmentHealthcarePolitics

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!