By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortion President Barack Obama
Thanks go out to those kind readers who wrote me about “President’s Breathtakingly misleading celebration of ObamaCare.” Those remarks were put together at the very end of the day, and I would like to add a few additional thoughts today.
When the President (choosing to ignore the obvious holes that undercut his contention) bragged that “7.1 million Americans have now signed up for private insurance plans through these [ObamaCare] marketplaces — 7.1,” it was taken as a signal for his supporters to follow the party line: debate/disagreement about ObamaCare was now old news.
If you think about that, it’s quite amazing. A long string of snafus, broken promises, frequent instances of backsliding, revisions, and extensions count for nothing: all’s well that ends well. To point out that we weren’t even close to the “end” was said to be sour grapes, an unwillingness to face reality: ObamaCare had succeeded.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan had an interesting response in a column titled “A Catastrophe Like No Other: The president tries to put a good face on ObamaCare.”
She began with a succinct summary of the “daily argument”:
“Seven point one million people have signed up!”
“But six million people lost their coverage and were forced onto the exchanges! That’s no triumph, it’s a manipulation. And how many of the 7.1 million have paid?”
“We can’t say, but 7.1 million is a big number and redeems the program.”
“Is it a real number?”
“Your lack of trust betrays a dark and conspiratorial right-wing mindset.”
Noonan could have added a litany of other problems and examples of misdirection in the President’s remarks besides this one we read later in the column:
“What the bill declared it would do—insure tens of millions of uninsured Americans—it has not done. There are still tens of millions uninsured Americans. On the other hand, it has terrorized millions who did have insurance and lost it, or who still have insurance and may lose it.
For instance, the President’s happy-talk presentation ignores that premiums are not going down, for most people, but up…substantially. At the same time deductibles are also increasing…substantially. There is every reason to believe the increases will be even larger next year.
Her larger point is this.
“Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.”
But it is crucial to remember that Obama and his administration and his congressional allies knew perfectly well that ObamaCare was a boon to the abortion industry. As NRLC has pointed out, when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, an array of long-established laws, including the Hyde Amendment, had created a nearly uniform policy that federal programs did not pay for abortion or subsidize health plans that included coverage of abortion, with narrow exceptions. However, key provisions of the 2010 Obamacare health law sharply departed from that longstanding policy. Among other objectionable provisions, the Obamacare law authorized massive federal tax subsidies to assist many millions of Americans to purchase private health plans that will cover abortion on demand.
Likewise, they knew that rationing was built-in to ObamaCare.
“Obamacare authorizes Washington bureaucrats to create one uniform, national standard of care that is designed to limit what private citizens are allowed to spend to save their own lives,” explained Burke Balch, J.D., director of the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics. “We are convinced most Americans do not believe that the government should limit the right of Americans to use their own money for health care necessary to save their lives. Yet, that is exactly what Obamacare does.”
Beyond any discussion of the inflated claims for ObamaCare’s enrollment “success,” we must never forget that there are components that were deliberately built in to provide massive abortion subsidies and to ensure rationing of health care.