MISSION: U.S. Veteran and Author Revealing Reality with Daily Reading / Sharing of Select, Intelligent, and Informative Articles, Columns, and Commentary.
Back in 1994, when Bill Clinton was pushing his own version of "comprehensive health reform," the insurance industry launched its infamous "Harry and Louise" ads to deliver a simple message: The Clinton plan would force families to give up their own health plans.NBC News has already uncovered evidence that members of the president's staff knew that millions of people would not be able to keep their insurance. It may be possible to claim that the president was so preoccupied with his golf game, bracketology, parties, and TV that he was unaware. "President Bystander" as the GOP now correctly labels him. But incompetence does not negate the fraudulent nature of the passage of Obamacare.
In one of these, the middle-class couple pours (sic) over a pile of documents at the kitchen table, while a narrator intones about how "things are changing, and not all for the better," and how "the government may force us to pick from a few plans designed by government bureaucrats."
"Louise" then complains that "having choices we don't like is no choice at all," and the ad concludes with the couple saying, "They choose, and we lose."
The campaign was devastating. Even though Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, Clinton's bill never made it out of congressional committees.
So when President Obama decided to take another stab at health care, he was determined to avoid that pitfall. He endlessly promised in the most emphatic way possible that under his plan, Harry and Louise would have nothing to worry about.
"Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you," the president said at a July 2009 rally in New Jersey. "First of all, if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you."
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we discuss the issue of the misinformed and the uninformed voter
typically voting for Democrats. Rush Limbaugh often refers to this
voting segment as the “low information” voter. It is from this set of
voters that the left is able to draw the additional 30 – 35 percent of
the votes that they need to win elections, taking our country down the
path of socialism.The uninformed voter will not take the time to learn the facts.
For those on the left who seem befuddled by the train wreck that is ObamaCare,
perhaps some introspection is in order. The political lynching of
conservatives for the last five years has been an unmitigated lie.
Everything conservatives predicted is coming to pass. Every truth they
told is playing out publicly. The serial prevaricator who is our
president has finally been exposed in ways that even his staunchest
spinners cannot spin. The crashed $643 million dollar website, the
skyrocketing premiums, the job losses, the dropping of plans by
insurers, all of it is out there now regardless of the president's skin
color, which was never the issue except to the extent that it has
protected him from responsibility for what he has purposefully done,
even to his supporters. Chairman Mao made the following statement on April 30, 1971, to Edgar Snow in an interview that he hoped would reach the ears of American policymakers. In it he said:Think of that.
“China should learn from the way America developed, by decentralizing and spreading responsibility and wealth among the 50 states. A central government could not do everything. China must depend upon regional and local initiative. It would not do (spreading his hands) to leave everything up to him (Mao).”
Forty years later, China was on the brink of becoming the world’s largest economy, and President Barack Obama had not a clue about learning “from the way America developed” or about depending on its “regional and local initiatives.” He was lost in the sublime quiddities of his incomparable colleagues from the Ruling Class. That would be the yokels back at academe, drunk on their higher knowledge of “how-to” studies: how to teach (education departments), how to think and analyze (psychology and sociology departments), how to administer and govern (variations of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard State University) — all the trendy “studies” offered by the modern-day multiversity or whatever they call it. Obama does not have very many classically educated university graduates to call on. In fact, he does not have many educated people to call on.
The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent as many as 16 million are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.Over at Kaiser Health News the reporting says:
Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies.In Laszewski’s words? “This is a fine mess.”
… An estimated 14 million people purchase their own coverage because they don’t get it through their jobs. Calls to insurers in several states showed that many have sent notices.
Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people — about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.
Conservatism has steadily spread throughout the Republic since its larval days in the 1950’s, and Liberalism has declined to its present need for a proper burial.Time after time in American history political arguments are made to seem ephemeral — until, with massive impact, they slam into the body politic with the force of a vast and violent tornado. Debates about slavery were just that for millions of Americans — until the abrupt arrival of the Civil War. Millions of American families were directly and permanently affected by the sea of clashing blue and gray armies that left behind one battlefield after another strewn with the brutalized dead bodies of over 600,000 husbands, sons and brothers. Likewise the distant voices of Adolf Hitler and Japanese war lords were nothing more than radio rantings and newsreel footage — until Pearl Harbor and the explosion of World War II. Over 400,000 Americans died on far away beaches, jungles and oceans, changing America and Americans forever.
The reason is that the vast majority of Americans favor free enterprise and personal liberty. Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, in his book, The Battle, offers a figure that roughly approximates other studies:70 percent of Americans who favor free enterprise and personal liberty versus 30 percent of Americans who do not favor such freedom.
Jeanne Shaheen doesn’t sound like a Democrat who just won a government-shutdown “victory.” Ms. Shaheen sounds like a Democrat who thinks she’s going to lose her job.Strassel went on to note the problem causing this wave of panic among Democrats:
The New Hampshire senator fundamentally altered the health-care fight on Tuesday with a letter to the White House demanding it both extend the ObamaCare enrollment deadline and waive tax penalties for those unable to enroll. Within nanoseconds, Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor had endorsed her “common-sense idea.” By Wednesday night, five Senate Democrats were on board, pushing for… what’s that dirty GOP word? Oh, right. “Delay.”
After 16 long days of vowing to Republicans that they would not cave in any way, shape or form on ObamaCare, Democrats spent their first post-shutdown week caving in every way, shape and form. With the GOP’s antics now over, the only story now is the unrivaled disaster that is the president’s health-care law.
Hundreds of thousands of health-insurance policies canceled. Companies dumping coverage and cutting employees’ hours. Premiums skyrocketing. And a website that reprises the experience of a Commodore 64. As recently as May, Democratic consultants were advising members of Congress that their best ObamaCare strategy for 2014 was to “own” the law. Ms. Shaheen has now publicly advised the consultants where they can file that memo.What Strassel is describing here is the real world political effect of what Tyrrell described as (bold print for emphasis added):
Liberalism’s distinctive trait: overreach. At times Liberals promise too much. At times they attempt too much. Occasionally they actually achieve too much, leaving many Americans fearing for their liberties and the contents of their wallets.The Obamacare overreach is nothing if not a story of lost liberty (promises you can keep your doctor are up in smoke) and the contents of American wallets are being emptied to pay for skyrocketing premiums.
Here in the United States, we await the imposition of ObamaCare, despite the fact that the public does not want it, the nation cannot afford it, politicians regret it, and companies seek exemption from it. Our current pace of $1.6 trillion annual deficits, for all the talk of Keynesian gymnastics, is unsustainable — and even acknowledged as such by those who are most responsible for the latest round of fiscal irresponsibility. As we near fifty million Americans on food stamps, another year of 9-plus percent unemployment , and the third $1 trillion-plus budget deficit, even statists are beginning to see that statism does not work.Tyrrell thought that last line was a bit over the top, yet two years later the sight of frantic Democrats running to keep from being run over by Obamacare as Strassel and others have noted is nothing if not a confirmation of both Tyrrell and Hanson. In fact, Hanson’s mention of “9-plus percent unemployment” understates. While the unemployment rate is technically listed at 7.2%, in fact, as is noted in Forbes back in July:
But the “official” unemployment rate doesn’t count men and women like G. — discouraged workers who have settled for part-time jobs or have given up looking altogether. Tracking those individuals, under what’s called the “U-6″ rate, gives a very different measure of the nation’s unemployment rate: 14.3%.There are political consequences for things like this. The mistake too many people make is that in seeing no political consequences pop immediately in this or that election, they ignore the looming disaster that — whether it takes years or decades to appear — eventually and inevitably does hit. Debates over slavery had been ongoing since the Constitution was approved in 1787 — a full 74 years passing before the Civil War erupted at Ft. Sumter in April of 1861. A full two decades — plus had passed between the end of World War I and the attack on Pearl Harbor. These changes do not occur overnight. But when they arrive, they can change the country so thoroughly Americans find themselves looking backwards in wonder at a country they once knew well and no longer exists.
