Obamacare's Defenders Are Reaching: My Reply To Letter In Westfield Leader

Mr. Stephen Schoeman offered in the Westfield Leader a very impassioned defense of Obamacare last week.  The crux of his argument was a moral one.  “The time has come when all of us should pitch in and make it work and support its noble purposes and objectives,” he says.  While I do not deny his sincerity and obvious decency as a person, the key words here are “purposes” and “objectives.”  Unfortunately in the world at large it is not gallant intentions but concrete results that matter.  And what are the results that we are seeing so far? 

First of all, as we know the initial roll-out has been a disaster.  Mr. Schoeman dutifully defends the fiasco by offering that many a product introduction in the past were plagued by initial problems; he lists Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Merck, GM, etc. to bolster his case.  But this clearly is a false analogy as the American people are not compelled by law to purchase a flawed iPad, PC, operating system, drug or automobile.  Unfortunately that is not the case for the millions who are now being informed they will not, in fact, be able to keep their plans if they so choose—a direct violation of the President’s oft-touted promise, which Mr. Obama himself now admits.  To make matters worse, these same coerced citizens have no choice but to attempt to navigate a terribly bug-plagued website or lose their insurance—and they must enter very private and personal data into a system whose security from hackers remains in doubt to put it mildly.   If Mr. Schoeman wishes to use the private sector analogy, I ask how long does he think the people in charge would keep their jobs if a roll-out were even half so embarrassing and expensive and untested as this one in a for-profit company?   Yet Ms. Sebilius will of course keep her position for no one in this administration ever loses a job due to incompetence or dishonesty.

I will say Mr. Schoeman’s letter is insightful in that it aptly illustrates the political/ideological divide that has now cleaved the country effectively in half—hence the so-called “gridlock” in Washington, which as one suspicious of swift government—I prefer safe government as did Madison and company—I happen to welcome.   The division between right and left can basically be distilled down to this:  the right favors personal freedom and is willing to accept a certain level of inequality of outcome as a result, whereas the left yearns for equality of outcome and is willing to stifle some personal freedom to achieve it.  I am not sure why this debate persists.  History shows you get a greater level of both freedom and equality through a system by which people are permitted to achieve unequal results.  But based on historical inaccuracies that plague the President’s speeches, I don’t think the past interests many in this administration. 

Make no mistake, Obamacare is classic wealth redistribution as the millions whose premiums are rising can attest.  People who once had already quality healthcare are being forced to pay higher premiums under a false premise that their current plans are “substandard.”   This is simply not the case.   

So when Mr. Schoeman  asserts that: “The new law provides for free preventative care…”  I must ask him “free” for whom?   I am always fascinated when big government advocates refer to goods and services offered by Washington as “free.”  In the case of Obamacare, unless an insurance company offers policies pro bono it is not “free.”  It is merely paid for by someone else whose premiums just went through the roof to cover it. 

If you don’t believe me, then consider the observation of card-carrying Democrat and left-leaning journalist Kirsten Powers, who until recently was one of the Affordable Care Act’s most vocal supporters:  “My blood pressure goes up every time that they say they are protecting  us from ‘substandard’ health insurance plans because there is nothing to support what they are saying.   If I want to keep my same health insurance it will cost twice as much and there is nothing substandard about my plan.  There’s no explanation for the doubling of my premiums other than the fact that they are subsidizing other people.  They need to be honest about that.”

If that is not redistributed wealth in pursuit of equality of outcome I don’t know what is.  That is not an ancillary. It is integral to the whole project.   There is no such thing as a “free” government service for the government by its very structure cannot create anything to offer on its own.  It confiscates resources from one group and doles them out to another.  Free to one person is a jackboot to the wallet to someone else.

How does this “free” healthcare get subsidized by Ms. Powers and the rest?   Mr. Schoeman doesn’t mention the ten items that all policies are now required by law to cover otherwise they are labeled by the administration as “substandard.”   These items include mandatory maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorders, and pediatric services for all.   Mr. Schoeman might be hard-pressed to explain to a single man, or a family long past raising young kids, or someone who is not an alcoholic, drug abuser or schizophrenic why they must be compelled to purchase such unnecessary coverage.   If this is the society you want, where a single man in his mid-twenties helps foot the bill for someone else’s child’s visit to the pediatrician then then we can have that debate in a forthright and honest manner…but do not call it “free” pediatric care, and be prepared for the marketplace consequences.

And what are some of the very real consequences Mr. Schoeman leaves out in his homage to this new healthcare utopia?  Well as I said for millions of ordinary middle class Americans already satisfied with their healthcare who were assured by the president that their lives would not change, costs will rise by an average of 41% (Manhattan Institute) next year.  For those who were full time employees, many will be reduced to part-time so employers can avoid fines while others will lose their quality company plans and be dumped onto the exchanges.  Many other firms will simply lay people off as their costs escalate exponentially.  For the young who were so in the tank for the “hip” candidate Obama, their rates on average will go up 98% for men and 58% for women.  (In my mind’s eye I see turkeys sporting “Audacity of Thanksgiving” t-shirts but I digress.)  There’s a reason beyond website glitches that the healthy young, whose subsidies are the essential fuel for this wealth-transfer machine, have been slow to join up.   I wonder if all these people losing their once good healthcare, their jobs, being forced to buy coverage they neither want or need, and seeing their already stretched family budgets pushed even further to the brink agree with the Mr. Schoeman that the benefits of this new law “far outweigh the harm done to people.” 

Even some Congressional Democrats from solid blue territory like Sen. Feinstein realize the political toxin this debacle has become and have proposed legislation designed to allow people to do what the president insisted they could do more times than I can count: keep their plan if they like it.  But this destroys the entire structure for the increased premiums are what make the math work.  Like a Jenga game, if you remove this key block, the tower implodes and collapses.  Obamacare is what happens when you put someone at the helm who has never run any organization beyond a political campaign, and for whom the most important executive job in the world was an entry-level management position.   It is the reason we prefer governors over legislators as presidents.   (One can only speculate what a seasoned manager/executive like Mitt Romney, with the past successes and failures of his own Massachusetts healthcare plan as lessons to draw from, could have accomplished in this same three-and-a half-year timespan.  I bet the website would be working at least!) 

Something else stood out to me in Mr. Schoeman’s letter and perhaps this is more of a general commentary on our differing views of society as a whole.  He touts (my emphasis added) “Children under 26 years of age may be added or kept on a parent’s health insurance policy.”    We shall see how that stands up as young dollars are needed to make this work as I said.   Regardless, throughout most of human history twenty-five was considered well into adulthood.  Now a 25-year-old is still a “child”?  Apparently they are adult enough to drive, to work, to vote, to smoke cigarettes, to drink alcohol, to have abortions, to change their names, to live alone, to change their gender, to marry, to buy prescription drugs, to go to war, to have children, to gamble, but not yet mature enough to pay for their own health insurance?   Two generations ago many of these “children” already had real children of their own!   I certainly wasn’t a child at twenty-five years of age.  And I had been paying for my own healthcare for years.  But that is the dependent mindset that seeps into the national character as bigger government makes for an ever smaller and more infantilized citizenry. 

There is an old analogy that offers if you toss a frog into boiling water it will jump out.  But if you put it in tepid water and slowly raise the heat to boiling, the cold-blooded animal will adjust its own temperature accordingly and boil itself without ever knowing what happened.  I think that those in favor of the gradual encroachment of the metastasizing central state, from Wilson to FDR to LBJ  to Bush II “The Lesser” and now Obama, hope that the boil will be too gradual for a somnambulant American populace too distracted by American Idol and the Kardashians to notice.  That we will not realize just how much autonomy this once free people of the Republic have willingly surrendered over to a huge, clunky and corrupt wealth-transfer apparatus in Washington.   If, as the administration is betting, the uproar over Obamacare premium shock dies away after the website is fixed (and it will be eventually) and people adjust their temperature accordingly then the Stephen Schoemans of the world will have moved this great country that much farther down a road towards what he may genuinely and with purest heart believe to be a better society, but I (and my calculator) fear just moves us one step closer to our ruination. 

If, as Mr. Schoeman seems to believe, intention is what matters most in public policy then we must ask: what is the real intention of Obamacare at its core?  I wonder.  Is it universal coverage or really universal dependency on the benign central government about which De Tocqueville so presciently warned?  Either way, the results we do know are this:  The more dependent on government the people become, the more they look to the state rather than themselves for their basic needs, the more they vote Democratic to keep the IV drip going—until it eventually runs dry but we’ll worry about that later won’t we?   And for a purely political cynic like Obama, protected by his acolytes like Mr. Schoeman who will never have to foot the bill he and fellow statists are leaving to our grandchildren, creating as many Democrat-for-life voters for whom government is their primary source of income and fulfillment, even if it takes some ends-justifies-means mendacity to do so, is a noble enough aim…for now.

That's just my opinion...I could be wrong.