Democrats are certainly not lacking for excuses concerning the disaster that is ObamaCare, which means we have some debunking to do.
Let's start with how Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota is trying to make an excuse for Obama's broken promise about keeping your plan and your doctor -- an excuse all the other Democrats are now parroting. Ellison said:
"Even though he may have said if you like your decent insurance, your insurance that works, you can keep it -- I think people really get that, and when he said if you misunderstood what I said, I'm sorry for that, I think that showed integrity."
How stupid are we supposed to be? First let's dissect this statement. Obama never said the word "decent". That is a word Ellison has editorialized to help cover up for what the president said. Then he claimed that Obama had somehow owned it by saying, well, if you really didn't understand what he said, he was sorry. But it's not that difficult to understand what he said over and over and over again. There were no qualifiers. He said if you liked your plan, you could keep it. Period.
Ellison also claimed that everything the president did and said was designed to get Americans health care. Oh? Then why does the CBO estimate that even if everything worked perfectly, you're still going to have 30 million uninsured? Because the motive was never getting people health care. It was always political power.
Here are the other excuses.
It's the fault of congressional Republicans! I would like to remind you that of all the congressional Republicans there are, none of them voted for ObamaCare. None. Zero! So how is it their fault we're facing this fiasco? Remember when the Republicans in the House were trying to get the Senate to pass legislation to delay or defund ObamaCare? Every one of those proposals had provisions in it to fund the government. But you didn't hear about that. Democrats and the media were too busy trying to make sure they blamed the Republicans for the shutdown. They tried to warn America. They tried to encourage the Democrats to delay it until they figured out all the bugs in the system. You know why they didn't want to delay it? They didn't want to delay the sticker shock until closer to the 2014 mid-term elections. The president says now that if the Republicans would work with him to try to fix it, we would be a whole lot better off. No. The reason the Republicans are not working with the Democrats to fix this train wreck is that, philosophically, Republicans don't agree with a redistribution model, which is what this is. All they want you to do is get in line like a bunch of ducks and buy what they want you to have for health care. Never mind what you want. We had a health care system in America that was mostly doing just fine. It was having some problems -- not everybody could get insurance -- but it's like a building that had a leak in the roof. You don't blow up the building to fix the leak in the roof. Just fix the leak in the roof. You could have done that with expansion of Medicaid, or early participation in Medicare, or a high-risk pool for people who are uninsured. But Democrats wanted to blow the whole thing up and replace it with a government-centered model, and it's not on Republicans to help them "make that work," because it's not possible for that to work.
States refusing to participate in ObamaCare made it more difficult. Oh really! Thirty-six states said no thank you, we will go with the federal exchange instead of building our own. Here's why the states that didn't participate decided not to. There were strings attached. You had to expand Medicaid the way they want to do it at the federal level, and they would subsidize it for three years only, after which the costs would be on the states. Now how would it have been easier if all 50 states jumped on this runaway train? That makes no sense.
Web site glitches. They've had some glitches all right! That might be because they hired a company with a no-bid process. The president said anything over $25,000 would require a bidding process, but they made an exception for this company out of Canada to put this thing together -- and it's now cost upwards of $600 million -- because one of Michelle Obama's former classmates just happens to be an executive with this company. Glitches, huh? They had three years to put this thing together. Folks, I know computer people that helped me put together this web site two times, and one time they did it in two months. When we know we're going to have heavy traffic, this company known as Dynamix knows how to increase what you call the portal -- which allows more people to come through at one time. It took them a month to figure that out.
High web site traffic! Actually this was Bolshevik. Their traffic was much lower than they were expecting. But even if it had been as high as they claimed, there are systems that can watch the screen and see when traffic is higher, and when it does, it opens a bigger spigot. This web site has one. The federal government doesn't?
Insurance companies are to blame? Actually insurance companies were part of this scam, but they didn't tell Obama to roll this thing out on October 1 even if it wasn't ready. What the insurance companies did wrong was to agree with what Obama wanted to do, which was to cover everyone for everything and just raise the price of the premiums to cover it all.
None of these excuses hold water because everything Democrats try to blame on others was actually their own doing. The fact of the matter is that ObamaCare is failing because ObamaCare is a flawed concept. The problem is not glitches. The problem is that it doesn't work when it functions by design.
It is a terrible idea and a terrible law, and the only fix that can work is complete repeal.
