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Human
Events...
ObamaCare’s
lonely birthday
He’s just a
bill, sitting here on Capitol Hill
by John
Hayward
03/23/2012
This week
marks the second birthday of ObamaCare, among the greatest legislative
disasters in American history. By
even
the most conservative estimates, its costs are more than double what we
were
originally promised. It’s
going to strip
20 to 50 million Americans of their health insurance, as overwhelmed
employers
decide the best course of action is dropping coverage altogether, with
the
resulting fines increasingly viewed as a wise investment to escape
ObamaCare’s
clutches. The
President’s infamous
promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it” has become a
bitter joke,
of the variety often traded across the Siberian snow.
ObamaCare
has been causing health care costs to rise, and it will actually reduce
our
supply of doctors. It
has already
destroyed thousands of jobs, and it will soon unleash a fresh avalanche
of
job-killing taxes on job creators.
It
has destroyed religion and conscience, forcing Catholic institutions to
pay for
birth control, and even dropping an abortion surcharge upon everyone
enrolled
in plans that cover elective abortions.
Even as it
devours American prosperity, liberty, and health, great festering
chunks of
spoiled legislation have been dropping from ObamaCare’s flanks. The CLASS Act is gone, as
are some of
ObamaCare’s most instantly repulsive feeding mechanisms, such as the
scheme to
force American small businesses to submit millions of 1099 tax forms
every
year. The House
just voted to disable
the death panels. Enraged
Americans have
watched Obama’s Health and Human Services Department issue thousands of
ObamaCare waivers to politically connected businesses and labor unions. The Supreme Court is on
the verge of striking
down the very heart of ObamaCare - the individual mandate that gives
Congress
limitless power to force Americans to purchase politically approved
goods from
selected private firms - as the Constitutional outrage it so clearly is.
Meanwhile,
lopsided majorities of Americans favor the complete repeal of
ObamaCare, and
have consistently done so for years.
It
might be the best sustained polling ever seen for a policy preference. The latest Rasmussen poll
has Americans
favoring repeal 57-39 percent. Strong
support for repeal reached an eight-month high in the wake of Obama’s
war on
the Catholic Church. The
Heritage
Foundation has launched an online petition demanding ObamaCare repeal. If President Obama could
somehow be persuaded
to repeal the law, it would become, by a huge margin, the most
successful
job-creation initiative of his presidency.
Of course,
that won’t happen… but it’s interesting to note that Obama doesn’t seem
very
eager to talk about his “signature achievement” any more. It’s swirling down the
memory hole, along
with those nostalgic sepia-toned photo-ops of the President touting
Solyndra as
one of the greatest successes of his trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill. Give Obama another month,
with a few more
points shaved off his poll numbers, and he’ll be claiming ObamaCare
wasn’t his
initiative per se. Actually,
he’ll start
doing that the moment Mitt Romney secures the Republican nomination. Isn’t it funny that the
sole political value
of this towering legislative triumph lies in convincing voters that
RomneyCare
is just as bad?
The
Republican National Committee does what the Obama Administration
refuses to do,
and commemorates the second anniversary of this melancholy bill with a
video
birthday greeting. Raise
a glass of your
favorite government-approved healthy beverage (soon to become a
mandatory
purchase, under the next wave of “individual mandates”) and celebrate
“ObamaCare’s Lonely Birthday.”
Read this,
plus links and a video, and other articles at Human Events
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