ObamaCare VICTIMS might indeed be gnashing their teeth

In response to Jay Carney: ObamaCare Critics Are “Gnashing Their Teeth” :

Actually, ObamaCare critics are steadily repeating the same logical, evidence-supported points they’ve been making all along, while the White House and its media lapdogs caper and dance like fools, because they were able to make up a phony number that matches the reduced expectations for their health-care scheme.  Obama and his supporters have ground their teeth down to the gum line waiting for something they could portray as a victory.  

Unfortunately for them, the same short public attention span that let them forget all the lies, broken promises, changes to the law, wasted money, and spectacular managerial incompetence to have a little Peanuts dance party in the Rose Garden on April Fool’s Day is likely to make their moment in the sun ephemeral.  By this weekend, the grim realities of ObamaCare – rising premiums, reduced doctor choice, more scandals from the exchanges, states where people still can’t get logged in and buy an insurance policy – will make the public wonder what, precisely, was being “celebrated” on Tuesday.

I’d imagine the victims of ObamaCare still doing quite a bit of tooth-gnashing, as they pay their thousand-dollar premium hikes, hear the first rumblings of even higher expenses next year, and wonder if they’ll be able to see the doctors that saved their lives.  One poor lady in California, who has wasted days of her life over the past two months trying to buy a policy, put Obama’s “achievement” into sharp focus when she explained why she was so desperate to buy a new plan after Barack Obama killed her old one: “They scare you.  They’re going to fine you.  How much are they going to fine me?  How much are they going to charge me for insurance?  That’s what I need to know.”

So congratulations, Team ObamaCare.  You started with an alleged 50 million uninsured, to cite your own often-repeated number… passed a law that rewrites the American Constitution so that people are fined out the wazoo for failing to buy a government-approved product from your cronies… and managed to insure, at best, a million previously uninsured people on the day failure to purchase insurance became a crime.  You can tell none of these people ever had a real job in the private sector before.  Their stockholders would have dragged them out of their “victory party” and sent them home with both pink slips and subpoenas in hand.

In my April Fool’s post-mortem, I suggested a little judo to turn Obama’s media narrative back around on him.  The way to put the O-bots in their place is to point out that of the alleged 7 million “enrollments” celebrated yesterday, 6 million of them were people that used to have insurance.  What Obama was actually celebrating yesterday was his success in fooling those people with false promises, using the Affordable Care Act to kill their old insurance plans, and then forcing to them to buy lower-quality, generally more expensive insurance from his exchanges.    

If Obama had been telling the truth when he promised they could keep their plans, and if estimates of 50 percent non-payment among the ranks of the formerly uninsured hold up, the “milestone” he would have been celebrating yesterday was selling as few as 500,000 valid insurance policies to the ranks of the formerly uninsured… with federal and state exchanges that cost billions of dollars, subsidies and overhead that will set us back a trillion, hundreds of thousands of hours lost by Americans forced to wrestle with the system, and thousands of jobs wiped out.  A few more “achievements” like that, and we’ll be a Third World nation at last.