Charles Krauthammer: Obamacare laid bare – The Washington Post.
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
Period. It’s the elite inside the castle walls preaching to their minions. It’s time to ask yourself if you’re a minion. Perhaps if you’re part of the MSM that decided not to inform the public you qualify.
Back to Charles…
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know.
….
Charles covers b & c with equal TTTTT for the strikeout but the conclusion sums it up…
Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.
So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.
And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.
I like the short story of “Button, Button” (at least told in The Twilight Zone) about the couple who receives a box with a button in it. If they press it, they receive a big cash prize, but someone they don’t know will be killed. They are faced with the ethical dilemma. They’d love the cash, but feel conflicted about killing a stranger. Ultimately they go for the cash, and they get it. They are told someone they don’t know was killed. The kicker is right at the end. They ask, “What’s going to happen to the box?” They are told, “It will be reset, and given to someone else, with the same offer. I can assure you they will be someone you do not know!”
So much of what the Democrats have pursued since Obama became president reminds me of this story, people taken in by greed, feeling justified in it, because they they haven’t gotten the breaks in life they feel they deserve, while at the same time rationalizing taking what matters most from others, since they feel little sense of attachment to their fellow human beings. All it begets is death and destruction, while people think they’re getting something for nothing.