Obama (doesn’t) Care

The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” – the recently adopted health care bill known as “Obama Care” to some and “Government’s Takeover of One-Sixth of the American Economy” to most others – is a newborn Frankenstein looking for a home. Originally brought to life by the federal government, the plan is now the object of the Mother-of-All custody battles as various states, including Oregon, jockey earnestly to snatch the fledgling aberration right out of its once warm and fuzzy national swaddling clothes. While the would-be parents all vie for custody, the American public watches with increasing horror this monster grow larger and progressively hostile with each passing day. Thankfully, adjudication of the custody question is easily arrived at: None of the greedy government bureaucracies petitioning for control is to be trusted with the bastard freak called “Obama Care” because they are fiscally unable to support it and the monster itself is Constitutionally illegitimate.

Overly cutesy unfit parent / mutant offspring analogies aside, the issue is a serious one in America today and for good reason. As unemployment reaches near-historic heights – hovering presently around the dreaded double-digit panic threshold – and folks lose their employer-provided coverage, the number of uninsured Americans looking for alternatives is rapidly increasing. These alternatives tend to be costly and difficult to qualify for, prompting some people to look toward government for relief. Certainly, at least in theory, the duly elected government of the greatest and most prosperous free nation in the history of mankind should be willing and able to step up and provide a viable solution to such a prevalent problem.

But in reality, it’s that very same government that caused health insurance to be so expensive and unwieldy in the first place and steadily growing numbers of Americans are recognizing this. The most recent Rasmussen poll shows that 61 percent of Americans want the health care law repealed, due at least in part to their knowledge that it was onerous federal mandates and too-tight insurance marketing dictates that caused the problem in the first place. Were the government not to require “one size fits all” policies that force everyone to pay for coverage of conditions they are unlikely to encounter (men having to pay for childbirth coverage, for instance) and allow policies to be offered interstate to broaden the risk pool, individual plans would be easier to obtain and be much more affordable.

The situation is getting even worse as “Obama Care” begins to go into effect: McDonalds Corporation just announced it is considering doing away with the coverage they provide to their hourly employees, surrendering them instead to the vagaries of the government plan. The Principal Financial Group, based in Iowa, has decided to stop selling health insurance altogether, leaving some 840,000 policy holders out in the cold. Other insurers, like WellPoint and CoventryOne, are dropping children’s coverage in California, Colorado, Ohio and Missouri because of new rules that force them to accept children regardless of their preexisting medical condition. John Goodman, of the National Center for Policy Analysis, estimates that between 87 million and 117 million more Americans will either lose their employer paid coverage or see co-pays rise drastically and suffer massive benefit reductions as “Obama Care” lumbers on. Almost universally, premiums for both group and individual plans are going up alarmingly in response to new regulations, separating even more people from medical coverage and dipping deeper into the wallets of those struggling to keep theirs.

Always touted by its supporters as affordable and simple, “Obama Care” is proving to be – even at the very beginning of its implementation – both clumsier and more costly to the consumer than the private sector service it was designed to “augment” (read: “supplant”). The ugly truth is that the federal and state governments themselves haven’t the money to actually carry out the legislation. The federal government, being crippled by spiraling debt and a budget deficit that stood at a record $1.42 trillion in fiscal 2009 (more than triple the previous year – also a record), can ill afford to take on the burden of providing universal health care. The states – and Oregon in particular – are mostly in the same boat. Oregon’s projected budget shortfall for the next biennium is over three billion dollars, and so they are salivating over the billions of federal dollars that would necessarily flow through the state to insure Oregonians.

Where will the money come from? The federal government doesn’t have it, nor do the states. Oregon sure doesn’t have it. Those citizens who thought that “government” health care meant “free” health care are in for a big surprise … the money will come from them, whether they like it or not. Either business owners will pay for it – through additional hamstringing taxes that will necessitate them laying off even more workers – or the individual will be forced to purchase a private policy, either on the beleaguered open market or from the government. Forced. In which America can employers be forced to insure their workers and citizens be forced to purchase a product, particularly one that is foist upon them by government?

The answer, of course, is an America whose present government has abandoned democratic principal and chooses to ignore the Constitution in favor of a “health care” program that is in truth but a giant money grab by cash-strapped bureaucracies … an America where nearly half the states have been compelled to align in a lawsuit against the federal government to prove the painfully obvious – that the “health care” scam is patently unconstitutional … an America that currently has a federal government that is actually contesting that suit, fighting tooth and nail against the majority will and clear best interests of its own citizens.

With nearly two-thirds of the country clamoring for repeal of “Obama Care” – whether administered by the federal or state government – it’s obvious that the American people are not yet to be fooled by an insolvent rogue government’s efforts to insinuate itself into the business of health care, particularly while utilizing confiscation and involuntary subscription as it’s principal funding tools. Profoundly unconstitutional in both form and function, “Obama Care” has met the same public welcome as Mary Shelley’s prototypical monster, and for the same reasons: It is unnatural, unwanted and – most of all – uncontrollable by those it was supposedly created to serve.


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