It is unlikely that anybody outside of the Washington-New York-Boston corridor was surprised by President Obama’s decisions to delay the Obamacare employer mandate for a year and to gut verification procedures for individuals seeking health care insurance subsidies from the government. Those developments were entirely predictable to common-sense Americans who understand that a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy represents a magnitude of bureaucratic complexity far beyond even the capabilities of a nation that detonated the first atomic bomb, sent a man to the moon and oversees Social Security and Medicare. So it was inevitable, after Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said full implementation was heading for a “train wreck,” that the president would seek to buy some time for key Obamacare mandates. The alternative was a political kamikaze plunge when the law was supposed to go into full effect on Jan. 1, 2014.
What none of the program’s advocates will ever likely admit, however, is that Obamacare’s problems aren’t simply a product of Republican opposition (just count all those multiple meaningless House votes since 2011 to “repeal” Obamacare), or the plodding federal bureaucracy (thousands of pages of new Obamacare regulations issued in the past year prove otherwise), or lack of funding (congressional GOP leaders aren’t brave enough to force the issue), or a shortage of political will (is there anything the IRS won’t do?). The fact is that Obamacare has stalled because the liberal vision of the 19th-century of government as benevolent Leviathan has crashed head-on into 21st-century reality.
The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger captured it well with this observation last week: “Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law’s theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.”
Simply put, the digitization of social interaction, economic transaction, the political process and everything in between is decentralizing the world, moving it in the opposite direction of the massive centralization of Obamacare. But nobody needs a federal bureaucrat to tell him what health insurance to buy when anybody with an Internet connection can simultaneously solicit bids from thousands of competing providers, pay the winner via electronic fund transfers, manage the claims process with a laptop, consult with physicians and other medical specialists via email, and even be operated on remotely by surgeons on the other side of the globe. Rather than imposing a top-down, command-economy, welfare-state health care model with roots in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany of 1881, a 21st-century government would ask what is needed to apply to health care access the Internet’s boundless capacity to empower individual choice.
Source: The Political Examiner
OK editor, it’s obvious you despise ObamaCare. I must say that because of our history of how our health care system was born, we started out at a disadvantage. It should never have been an employer based system.
But now here we are. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be a critic, but no one seems to have the answer.
I’m new to this forum, but since I’ve seen you give your opinions on several subjects, I’d appreciate your answer to the probably gravest threat our country faces, the unavailability of health care insurance because of the cost.
Let it eat editor.
OK, then let it eat tomorrow editor.
Didn’t realize you and Wayne stayed out this late.
Nite Johnboy.
What is it with the word despise this week and what does let it eat mean? I do not despise universal health care but you did pretty much nail it on the feeble attempt called ObamaCare or ACA. What I really despise is a government that passes a law that it is incapable of implementing in 4 years. The clowns in charge of this seriously came up with a 21 page application that is more complicated than a tax return and presented it with a straight face. They have also punted on three revenue generating provisions of the ACA because they simply did not have the executive ability to make it happen. The whole dream of an efficient universal healthcare system is now at risk because of utter ineptness on the part implementation. Perhaps if Pelosi, Ried, and Obama would have read the bill before they passed it we would be on the verge of a system that works for everyone. Alas the enthusiasm of 2009 has been squelched by the impotence of implementation. We should have just hired Canada to handle it.
I notice all the representatives in Washington want a repeal, yet not one has ANY intention of trying to find a more viable solution. The system we have is broke, and has been in a downward sprial for a long time. A simple fix 1 item at a time until it’s right is a better soution than a dump it and forget it plan.
Morning Joe! —–lol—– just caught that myself. “let it eat” is just junkie a__ Westside slang.
I go to Canada quite a bit and haven’t happened to run into one person yet who didn’t prefer their health care system over ours. I talked to a business owner last time I was there and he told me that although he paid more than most towards his health care (obviously because he makes good money), he said he is well satisfied with it and wouldn’t want to change to a different system. He also told me he is getting worried about it though because his country is allowing too many immigrants in in too short of time from Pakistan etc., and it is endangering their system which according to him, “Is sucking all the juice out of the orange.
Anyway, every legitimate poll shows Canadian support for their system around 70%.
Our Medicare system enjoys support in the 70’s which lends questionable credence to the “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phrase.
ObamaCare extends the life of Medicare by 8 years. Not only a good thing but a totally vital result.
IMHO, if ObamaCare would have maxed benefits at $150,000 dollars per incident instead of no lifetime cap, 60% of the medical bankruptcies in this country could have almost entirely been erased eventually. It surely would have had an affect on rates, and I also believe he was adamant about this provision because of his often repeated story of his mother dying of cancer and fighting her insurance company at the same time.
Goes to show you how emotions instead of common logic and reality can screw things up sometimes.
I believe our country lost the health care battle years ago, that’s why I’m all ears for a glimmer of hope from anyone who even vaguely believes they have an answer to this well entrenched financial cancer.
In any country in which 1/3 of the population is obese the health care industry will find itself in big trouble. It’s time to voluntarily step away from all-you-can-eat restaurants.
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