The damage ObamaCare is already doing to this nation is a catastrophe of the highest order, and we should certainly not celebrate that. But a destructive fraud that continues undetected is a bigger problem than a destructive fraud that’s finally been exposed. The collapse of ObamaCare is an opportunity for conservatives, if we have the juice to pull it off, to make the nation understand in unmistakable terms why big government interventions in free markets always end in disaster.
That may be no cause for celebration, but it is a welcome opportunity and we have to take full advantage.
ObamaCare represents myopic liberal thinking in its most glorious form. Liberals considered it some sort of social injustice that the poor and the sick had trouble getting health insurance, so they deemed to degree via fiat that this could not be so. To make this happen, they presumed to mandate an “everybody in, nobody out” health insurance system that would soak the young and the healthy to pay for the old, the poor and the sick. They thought they could take command of the dynamics of the health insurance market and make it work the way they wished for it to work, and having passed a law declaring this to be so, they assured everyone that it would work exactly the way the law said because the law said.
Now, less than two months after the opening of the ObamaCare exchanges, the law is collapsing in stunning fashion, because it turned out that nothing was ever going to work the way the law presumed to decree
The most stunning demonstration that liberals don’t understand this occurred on Friday when a group of House Democrats – including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer – called a press conference to insist that, hey, nothing in the bill says insurance companies have to cancel plans. If the bill doesn’t say it has to happen, then it must have nothing to do with the bill that it happened! They really believe this.
They have no understanding whatsoever of the fact that ObamaCare, by establishing minimum standards for plans and enabling HHS to define what qualifies for grandfathering, absolutely caused the plans to be cancelled. That’s what those of us in the real world call cause-and-effect. Denying this is like tipping over the first in a row of dominoes and insisting you had nothing to do with the last one falling down because hey, you only touched the first one.
The same is true of soaring premiums. Why, the ObamaCare bill didn’t mention rising premiums! No, it only mandated the loading up of every policy with costly add-ons that can’t be delivered for free. When Obama was going around claiming ObamaCare would reduce the average family’s premiums by up to $2,500 a year, he was pulling that number from the place where the sun doesn’t shine. He had no concept of what he was doing to a complicated market by imposing all these new rules.
Now he presumes to tell insurance companies that have already cancelled plans because they had to in order to comply with his law that they should go ahead and reinstate them. But unless he can reverse the market distortion created by his law, he might as well be telling them to unscramble an egg.
The most jaw-dropping comment in Obama’s nutty Thursday press conference was this one: “What we’re discovering is that health insurance is complicated to buy.”
No! What a stunning revelation. The man who went full speed ahead four years ago with a scheme to hijack the health insurance market and use it in a wealth redistribution scheme now discovers to his utter amazement that health insurance is complicated to buy. You learn something new every day, huh, champ?
So the latest liberal attempt to overrule the free market ends as they all do, in utter failure, with much work to be done just to mitigate the damage as much as is humanly possible.
Some of us warned of this all along. Maybe next time that will matter.
