In response to Curb Your Obamacare Enthusiasm:
I’m still astounded that the media is willing to sit back and take these wild figures from Administration that has repeatedly been caught lying about ObamaCare, and which also continues to claim their system can’t provide the hard numbers everyone really cares about. Valid policies with paid enrollment? Sorry, our billion-dollar program doesn’t count money. Demographic breakdown of young, profitable customers versus older, sicker, unprofitable enrollees? No can do – the system that accumulates terabytes of data about Americans, run by the government that builds surveillance back doors into every computerized device we purchase, doesn’t keep track of how old ObamaCare enrollees are, or whether they’ve ever had insurance before.
This is all crazy enough to make anyone with knowledge of data processing laugh out loud, but it’s also mighty suspicious to anyone familiar with Barack Obama’s M.O. This is the Administration that leaks like a sieve duct-taped to the business end of a fire hose, when it suits their political purposes. If the real ObamaCare enrollment figures and payment data were encouraging, they wouldn’t be sending Kathleen Sebelius out every couple of weeks to toss numbers off the top of her head. They’d be publishing voluminous reports and patting themselves on the back hard enough to dislodge their vertebrae.
As for that lingering question you astutely asked, it’s actually a question that needs to be asked fifty times, once in every state. But just for the sake of argument, suppose the death spiral can be avoided in most of them, and the ObamaCare business model proves more-or-less sustainable, even agreeable for the insurance companies (who sure do love the idea of government guaranteeing their fiscal health and legally requiring people to purchase their products.) It does still matter how large the program is. It matters that the Administration thought it would get 5, 7, or 15 million sign-ups this year, or next year.
Because otherwise, what was the point of all this? People’s lives have been ruined by ObamaCare. Violence has been done to the Constitution and rule of law. We’ll pay a price in the future that our Ruling Class will absolutely forbid us to count – you won’t be allowed to ask what drugs and treatments might have been developed without heavy-handed government regulations in the way, or how much better off we’d be if more sensible reform plans were followed instead of ObamaCare. We’ll pay a steep cost in freedom, as the government’s obligations to increasingly socialized medicine are used as a club to beat back every single effort to cut government spending. Titanic sums of money have been spent to create and launch ObamaCare, at both federal and state levels.
And if it was all for a system that can only increase net insurance enrollment by a couple million people, it’s the greatest failure in modern history, even if participating insurance providers decide they can live with the demographics, and Democrats manage to survive public anger over the botched rollout. It’s an insult to move the goalposts for success in a project this large. It is foolish for the American people to support political initiatives without demanding rock-solid metrics for success, and a clearly spelled-out program for repeal if those metrics are not met. And if the Ruling Class says it can’t provide those things, tell them to take their big ideas and stuff them, because it’s what you would demand from any private business you voluntarily chose to engage.
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