Liberals conspired for two years to plant a web of technologically sophisticated, hard-to-defuse bombs across the country’s urban and suburban centers, explosives that sparked up here and there frightening people and were programmed to detonate four years later.
Conservative SWAT teams screamed and pleaded and begged the public not to let them do it, and tried to stop the impending carnage via arguments, campaigns, and ultimately elections. Liberals just laughed at the chaos like the Joker.
Twenty-six states sought intervention from the Supreme Court, which may be on the verge of defusing the bombs, and if the Court doesn’t do it the next Republican Congress will. The right inevitably will spread collateral damage as they storm into downtown areas cordoning off districts, deactivating trigger devices, resetting timers, and safely dismantling and clearing out every last bomb.
Naturally, the media are blaming conservatives for the mess they’re going to make clearing out the explosives liberals planted.
The bombs in question are, of course, the various provisions of Obamacare. The disorder left by conservatives’ clearing them out constitutes “messy ripple effects” the mainstream media are warning about if conservatives get their way.
In one recent report expressing hope that some Obamacare terms will be retained, Associated Press reporter Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar explained [8], “It sounds like a silver lining. Even if the Supreme Court overturns President Barack Obama’s health care law, employers can keep offering popular coverage for the young adult children of their workers… But here’s the catch: The parents’ taxes would go up.”
Translation: None of us in the MSM wants Obamacare repealed, but perhaps we’ll be able to keep parts of it intact, and through workaround solutions trick Americans into reinstating the rest in Obama’s second term. What a shame, though, that parents with freeloading 26-year-olds will have to pay marginally higher rates for their children’s healthcare instead of soaking taxpayers for the difference—about $20 a month per child, according to an economist cited in the article.
Alonso-Zaldivar helpfully assures us that “The coverage for young adults up to age 26 on a parent’s health insurance is a popular provision that no one’s arguing about.” No one in your administration-supporting, socialized medicine-loving AP reporters’ pool, that is.
He warns, “Better Medicare prescription benefits, currently saving hundreds of dollars for older people with high drug costs, would be suspended.” Note how Alonso-Zaldivar writes as if seniors had been receiving such benefits for decades, and the extra cost would result in their being thrown in the street. He acts as though government doesn’t constantly make changes to federal programs, adding or removing funding depending on changes in officeholders, and as though state agencies and private charities aren’t constantly stepping in to make up the difference so constituents barely notice changes in their benefits. He seems to think Americans have never heard of budgets.
Alonso-Zaldivar adds, “Lacking legal authority, Medicare would have to take away the [“donut hole” coverage gap] discounts. Drugmakers, now bearing the cost, could decide they want to keep offering discounts voluntarily. But then they’d risk running afoul of other federal rules that bar medical providers from offering financial inducements to Medicare recipients.”
Lovely. So we can’t repeal Obamacare, because the federal government prevents drugmakers from generously offering seniors discounts to help pay for their medications. It’s got to be the government giving us treats or no one.
Last year I pointed out [9] the absurdity of liberal legislators protesting conservative efforts to repeal Obamacare as unconstitutional, given that the legislation itself exists in a different universe [10] from our Constitution. Idiots like Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee characterized [11] conservative repeal actions as the equivalent of trying to roll back a half-century of civil rights. In fact, the bill had only been eked into law months before, and conservatives were hoping to stop it before any of its provisions kicked in.
Liberals are taking the same tack now, arguing that undoing Obamacare would be hopelessly messy and complicated (never mind what it would do to our health care system if allowed to stand), would take away popular and longstanding benefits, and should be accepted as a fait accompli.
That is, unfortunately, what happened with big-government welfare programs [12] like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those programs became so entrenched in federal and state policy that today they’re nearly impossible to eliminate. Not so Obamacare, which—unlike those programs—was not passed with bipartisan support, or even a healthy majority of one party, and is still raw enough in voters’ minds that they’re full of piss and vinegar about abolishing it [13]. The fate of Obamacare will be sealed by November 6, and possibly by the end of this month, and Democrats know the odds aren’t in their favor.
Alonso-Zaldivar gets one thing right: “A mixed verdict from the high court would be the most confusing outcome. Some parts of the law would be struck down while others lurch ahead.” Though Obamacare authors’ failure to include a severability clause suggests that if one part of the bill fails the entire thing would have to be struck down, I agree: It absolutely should be abolished in its entirety, down to its last period.
No matter how untidy reversal of Obamacare is, the effects can’t be more destructive to the country’s healthcare system than letting it stand. And the deleterious effects of either course of action are entirely the fault of overzealous, power-grabbing, liberal Democrats.
Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics [14]
