New York Times: ObamaCare is wealth redistribution, but please don't call it that

Over the weekend, the New York Times dropped a bombshell. You should probably brace yourself, because their Saturday edition carried a report so shocking that there's just no way you could have seen it coming.  Still, harrowing though the experience may be, you have to hear.

ObamaCare is wealth redistribution. I know, I know.  That can't be.  The President who said he just wants to "spread the wealth around" and later promised us he's "not a socialist" would never embrace such a scheme.  Liberals love to tell us that ObamaCare is the very epitome of a free market capitalist system, so something must be wrong over at the Grey Lady.   From their story, titled "Don’t Dare Call the Health Law ‘Redistribution’:

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

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These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall. “Americans want a fair and fixed insurance market,” said Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who advised Mr. Obama’s team as it designed the law. “You cannot have that without some redistribution away from a small number of people.” In other words, ObamaCare is socialist wealth redistribution, but the administration doesn't like to call it that because they know it would never have made it through Congress if they had. In order to pass Obama's signature legislation, they had to make it "palatable to the public," which meant they could never admit what it actually did.  As the New York Time puts it:

In the end, America’s political culture may have made it unrealistic to expect a smooth public reception for the law, no matter how cleverly the White House modulated Mr. Obama’s language or shaped his policy to minimize the number of losers.

This is about as close to self-aware as the Times has ever gotten.  "America's political culture" is, in reality, defined by the views of the voting public. ObamaCare would have been dead on arrival had the President had been honest about it, and the NYT all but admits that the overwhelming majority of voters will not embrace large-scale liberalism unless it's cloaked as something more "acceptable." When a law like the ACA is passed despite it's overwhelming unpopularity, then fails so spectacularly, that truth is brought into stark focus. At the NYT, they're trying to have it both ways. They're finally admitting the disastrous law is redistributive, while ignoring the fact that they were a driving factor in its passage. Their suggestion that "the White House modulated Mr. Obama’s language" is a laughable pass-the-buck maneuver.  While it's true that the administration did everything possible to hide their socialist ambitions, it was the media which refused to investigate or report the truth - despite public outcry. They simply regurgitated the President's flim-flam, since they agree with his redistributive goals. If anyone is responsible for selling Obama's bogus "modulated language" to the American people, it was the left-wing propagandists at the New York Times.