Those Were the Good Old Days

In days gone by, whenever we looked at the incredibly dysfunctional political center of America, Washington, D.C., the most common question that came to mind was “What the hell were they thinking?!” I, for one, am very glad those days are past us now.

Why would I say that those days are gone? The answer is very simple, really. We no longer ask “What the hell were they thinking?” because that question has become outmoded, passé, and not remotely relevant anymore. It has been replaced with “Are these people even capable of any rational thought at all?” Gone are the days when you might listen to a politician and tell yourself, “OK, he (or she, just to make sure that NOW doesn’t fire-bomb my house) isn’t telling me the whole truth. There has to be a catch somewhere. There has to be a minor tax increase buried inside the bill or something. But what I’m hearing is at least the real gist of what they are proposing.” Today, especially emanating from Distraction Central, or as it is more commonly known, the White House, what we are being told doesn’t even come close to the reality. Close? What comes, on a regular basis, out of the mouth of the President, or Jay Carney or any of the President’s cabinet secretaries or special czars is so detached from truth that it’s not even in the same time zone. You really can’t even call it lies. Lies is too mild a word to use for these utterances. I checked my dictionary and thesaurus, and their recommended alternates would all be too kind in describing what these people have done. The closest that I came to an appropriate description would be that they told a WHOPPER!

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What do they do when they are caught in an outright and outrageous lie? Why these paragons of civic virtue simply man-up and openly admit the problem -- and that it was all the fault of Republicans or the Tea Party or al Qaeda for all I know. Or they even blame the American people themselves for being so gullible that they believed what they were being told. They might be correct in assigning blame to the American public. Ordinary, but lo-info, Americans bought the story (stories?) that something (actually anything) that Obama recommended as policy “won’t add one dime to the deficit”. As Obama claimed with his healthcare proposals, you will not be inconvenienced in the slightest way. You would never have your current insurance (you know, the one that you like) cancelled. You won’t have to change doctors from your current, trusted to physician to one trained in Islamabad or some other third world nation and who you have trouble understanding. Oh, but you’re not worried about any of that because you have a really, really great health insurance package that was negotiated by your union leaders, the same guys who told you that ObamaCare was going to be so great? Yeah, well, about that, they must have forgotten to tell you that you’ll be taxed at about 40% of the total cost of that healthcare. It would seem that they don’t want anyone’s health insurance to be too good. It would probably hurt someone’s feelings that the Obama mandated policies were not quite up to that standard. Obama also claimed that his mandatory “new and improved” health insurance policies would reduce the cost to the average American by $2,500. Except that the monthly payments are rising faster than the national debt. Those payments aren’t the only thing that’s skyrocketing. The deductible amount, while free from any lifetime limit, are in fact going up ten-fold or more. If under the insurance that you currently have, the one that you like, the one with the doctor that you don’t want to lose your old deductible was, say, $500 a year. So you had to take $40 a month, on average, to cover the initial costs of your health care. Reports in the media indicate that some policies that people have lost due to the mandates of ObamaCare showed that the deductible for those policies not only wiped out the $2,500 “savings” that Obama, Pelosi and Reid promised, they actually added to the total out-of-pocket cost of health care by up to an additional $3,500 a year over what you’ve been experiencing. That’s right, some of the new deductibles are up to $6,000 annually. No there is no lifetime cap on reimbursements under the new ObamaCare fantasy, er, I mean law, but the $40 a month you might have paid with your old, sub-standard and utterly inadequate policy now requires $500 a month in out-of-pocket spending. Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s $500 a month out of YOUR pocket. Not the pocket of the rich millionaires and billionaires. Not out of your employer’s group plan. Not out of thin air, or plucked off that tree that money grows on. Your pocket. Perhaps some genius could explain to me the difference between what Obama and his talentless crew refer to as (a) a sub-standard plan that only covers catastrophic care where you have to provide a significant amount for your own health care out of your own pocket and (b) his vastly improved healthcare scheme where you still have to provide a significant amount for your own health care out of your own pocket. I’ll be honest (since I’m not a politician) I don’t see a world of difference. In fact I don’t see any difference. Except that the government has interfered once again with the free market. And once again, screwed it up. And once again, the American people are paying for the ideas of idiots who desperately need adult supervision, although I personally would prefer that they received a long spell of solitary confinement.