Ah, Those Bothersome Glitches

The lead story in today's Wall Street Journal is titled, "Health Glitches Tarnish Obama". Imagine some past WSJ headlines.
"Race Baiting Dulls Hitler's Luster"
"Food Misallocation Takes Bloom Off Stalin's Rose"
"Titanic Mishap Impacts Captain's Reputation"

Meanwhile, Obama's home town paper, the left wing Chicago Tribune, has finally figured out what those Tea Party crazies understood four years ago.

President Barack Obama's signature accomplishment is teetering. The Obamacare website is a national punch line. Millions of Americans, repeatedly reassured by Obama that they could keep their doctors and health plans, are discovering that they can't. Their insurance policies are being canceled. The price of new coverage is substantially higher. The new coverage may force them to choose new doctors. And the law says they have to buy insurance or pay a fine.
People are deeply concerned, and for good reason. This is, as Democratic Sen. Max Baucus famously predicted seven months ago, a "train wreck."

...Democratic leaders forced the law through Congress without a single Republican vote. The architects of Obamacare brushed aside sharp warnings from tech wizards that the computer system wasn't tested and ready. They piled hundreds of pages of last-minute regulations on insurers. They forced insurers to cancel policies by the thousands because those policies fell short of the soup-to-nuts coverage required by the law.
 
...Accept that government doesn’t know what’s best for everyone. That people can decide what coverage they need and can afford. A strong marketplace offers choices for every wallet. Obamacare’s rules curtail those choices.

 ...It was a mistake to attempt such a massive government intrusion on a marketplace and a mistake to do so without anything close to a public consensus.

Question. Where were these (expletive deleted) when the bill was being debated?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/obamacare-ct-edit-1111-20131111,0,459810.story

Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy makes the case that President Obama's repeated lies promoting the ACA amount to an impeachable offense.

If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
How serious was this lie, repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United States?
Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.

...Barack Obama is guilty of fraud — serial fraud — that is orders of magnitude more serious than frauds the Justice Department routinely prosecutes, and that courts punish harshly. The victims will be out billions of dollars, quite apart from other anxiety and disruption that will befall them.The president will not be prosecuted, of course, but that is immaterial. ...the remedy for profound presidential corruption is political, not legal. It is impeachment and removal.

It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will ever be impeached. It is certain that he will never again be trusted. Republicans and sensible Democrats take heed: The nation may not have the stomach to remove a charlatan, but the nation knows he is a charlatan. The American people will not think twice about taking out their frustration and mounting anger on those who collaborate in his schemes.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363538/obamas-massive-fraud-andrew-c-McCarthy

There hasn't been much to celebrate over the past five years, politically speaking, but celebrate is exactly what Jonah Goldberg does in the latest issue of National Review (Schadenfreudarama, 11/25), gloating over the intractable mess the Democrats have created for themselves with Obamacare. Fun reading. (Can't link to it, sorry. However, if you go to the NRO website, you can buy the article for a mere $0.25 without a subscription. Well worth the expense).

In the same issue, Mark Steyn explains the inevitable abysmal failure of Obamacare and every other enterprise undertaken by this administration.*

For the past half century, Obama has simply had to be. Just being Obama was enough to waft him onwards and upwards: He was the Harvard Law Review president who never published a word, the community organizer who never organized a thing, the state legislator who voted present. And then one day came the day when it wasn't enough simply to be. For the first time in his life, he had to do. And it turns out he can't. He's not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.** And Healthcare.gov is about what you'd expect if you nationalized a sixth of the economy and gave it to the Assistant Deputy Commissar of the Department of Paperwork and the Under Regulator-General of the Bureau of Compliance.

*See for example http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/americas-wilderness-years/?singlepage=true

**Mark's standards are way too high. Obama is no Joe The Plumber either.

And lastly, this letter published in the Wall Street Journal, 11/12/2013.

It was with a great deal of empathy that I read Edie Littlefield Sundby's "You Also Can't Keep Your Doctor" (op-ed, Nov. 4). My wife died earlier this year from a recurrence of breast cancer. She had been ill off and on for about six years. She was one of the "uninsurable millions" on which the spin to pass the Affordable Care Act was based.

My wife received treatment for her illness because Arkansas had a high-risk pool specifically designed for its residents who had no other options for coverage. I believe that at the time the ACA was passed 36 states (if you include Massachusetts) had similar pools, which offered a state-level solution to a state-level problem. My wife was never once denied coverage. I lost count of how many doctors saw her or offered opinions during her illness. I have zero complaints about the care she received, right up to the hospice care that was provided at the end of her life. Of course, her coverage would have ended on Jan. 1, 2014.

 

John Trickett
Charleston, Ark.