Travis Rowley: Obamacare: Complete Disaster
Saturday, April 06, 2013
“It will be of little avail to the people if the laws are so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” – James Madison
As the nation grips itself for the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), Americans continue to endure the consequences of taking Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s advice in 2010 – “to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”
Since the passage of Obamacare the Congressional Budget Office has been continuously revising its cost estimate for the new entitlement program, which has “more than doubled since 2010.” It follows that, while President Obama promised not to “sign a [healthcare] plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future,” the Government Accountability Office now tells us that “Obamacare will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion.”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAnd the Left’s esteemed Keynesian economist Paul Krugman now admits, “Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re going to pay for the programs…Something is going to have to give…We’re going to need more revenue…Surely it will require some sort of middle class taxes…And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care, doc pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So the snarky version, which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.”
“Death panels.” Sarah Palin may be redeemed, but the country will not be.
Both employers and unions are already feeling the brunt of this federal behemoth. "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” Obama assured Americans over and over again. Now the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the looming mandates and regulations found within the new healthcare bill “will push 7 million Americans off of their employer-based health plans by 2022.”
Among other issues, union leaders and business executives were perplexed recently when they discovered “a provision buried inside Obamacare [that] will force many employers to pay an extra $63 per employee next year,” and that analysts are predicting that “most of the cost will likely be passed on to workers.”
Spokesmen for Boeing explain that the “Obamacare fee will add $25 million in costs on top of the already $2.5 billion the company spends each year on health benefits.” According to Vice President of the National Business Group on Health & Public Policy Steve Wojcik, "It's caught most employers, if not all employers, by surprise…They’re very upset about it.”
This is the ruinous nature of legislation – crafted by special interests and wizards of big-government – that nobody reads.
As Rep. John Conyers explained, “I love these members that get up and say ‘read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages, and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?”
Of course, Conyers, a Democrat, voted for Obamacare anyway.
Obamacare is a complete disaster. With healthcare costs and insurance premiums on the rise, Democratic Rep. John Barrows now refers to Obamacare as “legislation that wasn’t fairly vetted enough” and warns of “regulations that are coming down the pike that are way too onerous.” Former Obama aide Jeffrey Crowley confesses, “We know it’s going to be messy…There are going to be things that come up that are unanticipated.”
Unanticipated.
That is, unless you’re a Republican. Or anyone else who paid attention to Fox News and talk radio over the past several years.
Travis Rowley (TravisRowley.com) is the author of The RI Republican: An Indictment of the Rhode Island Left.
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