While the ruling class and the corporate media have slipped into collective madness over the well-deserved firing of FBI Director James Comey [read here and here my 2016 articles on Mr. Comey’s corruption of the law], the other political soap opera in Washington over the future of Obamacare is making its way from one side of the Capitol to the other.
Act II is coming after an intermission to change the props.
Of course, health care is way too important to trust to any politician, but, sadly, that ship has sailed. Wrenching back control of health care delivery from Washington is going to be a process, not a single vote, assuming the majority of Republicans in Congress really want to do that. However, aside from taking a chain saw to the tax code, it is the most critical domestic issue threatening the finances and quality of life of every family in the country.
Scarcely mentioned in the circus-like atmosphere on Capitol Hill is the fact that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have had their lives dramatically affected – turned upside down – by the catastrophic failure of Obamacare since its illegitimate birth in 2009.
These people aren’t the poor, the hapless or uninsured. They are just plain ‘ol hard working Americans, so they receive very little sympathy about what has happened to them or how their lives have been impacted.
As always, the real people that are inconvenienced, hurt, or have their lives ruined because of Washington’s cockamamie programs, laws, or schemes are most often just “collateral damage” to the social engineers, academics and politicians hell bent on perfecting the social order to their own tastes.
In the case of health care, Washington destroyed the existing health care delivery system so that less than 15% of the population that were uninsured – many by choice – and a comparatively small number of citizens that required insurance for pre-existing conditions, could be insured.
Normal people like you and me would have looked at the problem of that small number of citizens and offered a way to fix that problem.
Instead, the radical leftists rained down chaos on the lives of tens of millions of average Americans – over 85% of whom prior to 2009 were happy with their own health insurance when polled. These citizens watched helplessly as the dramatic increase in both premiums and deductibles – often three and four fold, or more in some states – have demolished family finances, and forced many of them to say goodbye to longtime family doctors and services.
The radicals knew this disaster would happen, of course. It was planned. It was not done with the best of intentions, but with the jaded eye of a jailer towards the prisoner.
Led by then President Obama, they constructed a web of outright lies and financial deceptions to promote a wealth transfer scheme, all to pave the way for fulfilling their dream of “single payer” nationalized health care – God forbid.
In a sane world every Democrat that voted to pass Obamacare, including former President Obama, would be publically humiliated and banished to some remote, inhospitable, mosquito-infested island for what they have done to the country and the citizens they were sworn to protect.
Last week, Senator Mark Warner, the fabulously wealthy crony capitalist Democrat from Virginia, among the least winsome of the gaggle of un-winsome members of the Congress, actually had the audacity to claim, “Instead of working with Democrats to improve [Obamacare] Republicans voted for a plan to take healthcare away from millions of Americans.”
Really, Mr. Warner? The Senator, of course, cast the tie-breaking vote for Obamacare in 2009, which was assembled with Republicans literally locked out of policy meetings, and passed unread without a single Republican vote.
Instead of being embarrassed, contrite or apologizing for what he has done to his constituents, like all radicals, Senator Warner rubbed the public’s face in it. He and his fellow leftists devastated millions of lives, and now want to transfer that guilt to Republicans – who for their part never saw a fight they didn’t run from.
You’ve heard a lot of self-congratulation from the left wing radicals about the alleged 30 million people who now have health insurance thanks to Obamacare – even though 20 million of those were actually placed into Medicaid. But you’ve never heard anything from the former President or his fellow radicals about the 22 million who lost or dropped insurance, which is the reason why health insurance participation rates, without Medicaid, have remained essentially unchanged since 2007.
And there is a barely a whisper of concern for the 150 million working Americans with health insurance that have collectively seen a 50% increase in premiums in the last five years, accompanied by increased deductibles and reduced choice.
It’s perverted. The ruling class is truly soulless.
The dirty little secret about government in the modern era is that this is the new normal. Over and over again we see the government grasping more and more control. And with more control and power comes increasing indifference; the government’s control and lack of accountability breeds contempt for those it purports to serve.
This same pattern is played out in virtually every public debate now. Public policy is all about serving the few at the expense of everyone else. It’s about money and power. From the nation’s bathrooms to college campuses, from clubs to restaurants, lemonade stands to airports, and everywhere and everything in between, only the opinion, feelings and well-being of the tiniest sliver of the tiniest minority of people matter, and the vast majority of citizens who just want to be left alone and mind their own business, are conscripted into the unwilling army that marches to Washington’s drums.
It is the new dividing line in America: You either believe in people, or you believe in government. They are mutually exclusive.
