According to some of the things our left-leaning friends are telling each other, wanting to repeal Obamacare is an example of “fascism”. I suppose America was fascist from 1776 until Obamacare was passed in 2010? I suppose America has since enjoyed a brief period of being a non-fascist state, 2010 to present?
‘Obamacare has fallen apart without Republicans’ dismantling it’
November 4, 2015
NRO’s Kevin Williamson has a good short review of the history of Obamacare to date: “Obamacare Is Dead”.
This was entirely predictable; in fact, it was predicted . . . .
Obamacare—Remember When?
March 8, 2015
Update (March 10th, 2015): Illustrated at Conservatism Repackaged.
(Reworded to match.)
Conservatives in 2009: If you pass Obamacare, healthy people will opt out, sending the insurance industry into a death spiral.
Also, you shouldn’t pass thousand-page bills that no one has read; you never know what will happen.
Liberals in 2009: NO IT WILL BE AWESOME
ARE YOU RACIST OR SOMETHING?
Liberals in 2015: IF THE SUPREME COURT DOESN’T FIX OBAMACARE, HEALTHY PEOPLE WILL OPT OUT, SENDING THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY INTO A DEATH SPIRAL
ALSO NO ONE COULD HAVE KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN
Conservatives in 2015: (Speechless)
Top Five New ‘Repeal Obamacare’ Shirts: Puns, Parodies, and More
October 23, 2014
Republicans have a real chance of winning the Senate this November, as many have been discussing (a few examples at random). Even if Republicans get a majority, however, they won’t continue the hard work toward repealing Obamacare unless they believe that the overwhelming majority of the American people still care about that. Given the opportunity, there will always be politicians willing to give in and let the entitlement state keep expanding, like the sometimes great but sometimes surprisingly viciously liberal Ohio Governor John Kasich. (Hot Air and a Washington Post blog are talking about his latest remarks on Obamacare.)
New Obamacare Parody T-shirt: ‘Amazing’
October 14, 2014
In 2012, conservatives remarked that government is much worse at many things than the free market, and asked, Do you want your health care to be more like using Amazon.com, or more like the Bureau of Motor Vehicles? Here’s conservative blogger Wintery Knight, July 5th, 2012:
I think this is important because conservatives are constantly being portrayed as “mean” in the media because we don’t embrace big government health care solutions. Everyone agrees on the problems, and everyone wants to help. The difference is that we conservatives think that health care is better when it is run profitably and is responsive to consumers and offers choice, low prices and high quality — like Amazon. . . .
All That, and More than 40 Million Americans Still Uninsured
October 9, 2014
One of the central arguments for Obamacare was that it was outrageous that more than 40 million Americans supposedly did not have health insurance (not necessarily that they didn’t have health care, but that they didn’t have health insurance). For example, President Obama said on June 15th, 2009,
We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women and children. . . . We need to get this done.
The Democrats pushed Obamacare through, and it made employers afraid to hire,* reduced many of those who had jobs to part-time hours,** and significantly increased health-care spending (as even the Obama administration eventually admitted). A survey indicated that a majority of doctors supported repealing or defunding the law (not to mention a majority of the country). Even NPR admitted that Obamacare would cause a doctor shortage or make it worse.
Obamacare Gave Us Ebola?
October 3, 2014
If the case of Ebola in America turns into a nationwide epidemic, it may be thanks to Obamacare. NPR this morning:
INSKEEP: Geoff, I want to ask about one other thing. Of course there have been many questions about why it was that the man with Ebola at one point checked into a hospital and was sent away again. Is it better understood how that happened?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has released more details about how this was overlooked. What happened was, last week Duncan showed up sick at the ER. Now, he told the nurse he had come from Africa. The nurse reported that, but the electronic system was set up so that doctors never saw that. Duncan went home and came back a few days later in an ambulance. In between that time, he may have infected other family members; so this little misstep could have had big implications.
Further to our efforts to reach people with personal stories they can relate to, please enjoy and consider sharing this short video by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdfn0Wiywk4&list=PL02D02B9A144182DB
Hat tip to Kathryn Jean Lopez, who provides extensive background here.
AMA Supports Obamacare, but Doctors Don’t Support AMA
January 5, 2014
Good to know: Matt Rodgers of Well-spent Journey, in “‘Primum non Nocere’ and the Affordable Care Act” at Liberty without Apologies, points out that the American Medical Association’s membership includes only “somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15% of practising US doctors” (not including the “Up to a third” of AMA members who “don’t pay the full $420 annual dues, including medical students and residents”). (The source is an article from the Canadian Medical Association Journal as reprinted on the Web site of the U. S. government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information.) This is useful to know when you hear any remaining supporters of Obamacare argue that the AMA supported or supports the law. It doesn’t mean that American doctors in general support the law.
A few weeks ago, I had to take a minimum-wage seasonal job (which, the job market still being what it is, is now my minimum-wage non-seasonal job). This week, my co-workers and I learned that we’re all going to be cut to part time, to comply with the Affordable Care Act.
The new law will require my employer to provide health insurance for any employees who work more than 29 hours a week. Employers who can’t afford to pay more money for the same amount of work will instead have to cut employees’ hours. Our former, mutually beneficial arrangements with our employer will now be against the law.
Obamacare Forces Insurance Companies to Pay for Quack Medicine
November 26, 2013
Kevin Williamson at National Review Online has some interesting thoughts on science and politics: “Qi Bono? Obamacare and the New Age quacks”. Excerpt:
. . . the Affordable Care Act includes a rule that insurers “shall not discriminate” against services provided by any licensed or formally recognized provider of health-care services, which means that such traffickers in pseudoscience as homeopathic healers, acupuncturists, herbalists, chiropractors, and the like will be covered under Obamacare, at least in states that recognize such quackery.
Funny Parody Song: Remy and Reason TV on Obamacare
November 2, 2013
“To be clear, that’s spending on top of the normal health-care inflation that would have happened if Obamacare had not been passed.” (“So much for ‘bending down the cost curve’ . . . .”)
Avik Roy explains at National Review Online: “Obamacare Bends the Cost Curve—Upward”
He’s discussing this post on a Forbes blog: “Obamacare Will Increase Health Spending By $7,450 For A Typical Family of Four”, by Chris Conover, who has the details.
“Every time Obama does something, the economy cries!”
Josh Mandel Could Win Ohio
August 31, 2012
State Treasurer Josh Mandel is the Republican nominee for Senate from Ohio. He is running against incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown.
Amazon Health Care or BMV Health Care?
July 6, 2012
No doubt he’s not the first to make such comparisons, but they bear repeating: Wintery Knight asks, Do you want your health care to be more like using Amazon.com, or like the Bureau of Motor Vehicles?
Oh, and apparently the latest “best estimate” from the government’s own Congressional Budget Office is that Obamacare will make 11 million people lose their employer-provided health insurance, or possibly up to 20 million.
Recall that President Obama, in trying to sell Obamacare, explicitly promised (July 28th, 2009, AARP “tele-town hall”),
More on Obamacare
July 4, 2012
Happy Independence Day! What better way to celebrate than with another depressing Mark Steyn column about our increasing dependence and the slow death of liberty?
Obamacare Won’t ‘Solve’ Uninsured Problem, Either
June 29, 2012
Yuval Levin at National Review Online reviews some of the practical effects of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision:
Combined, these two rather arbitrary acts of revision mean that if the CBO reassesses the law’s effect on the number of Americans without insurance (which it certainly will do) using the same methods it used originally, it is likely to find a much smaller reduction in the uninsured.
Drudge and the AP are reporting that the Supreme Court has judged the individual mandate not unconstitutional. Glenn Beck suggests that the reason Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberals on this vote (making it 6-3 rather than 5-4) is so that he could write the opinion and make it as narrow as possible, minimizing the damage it can do in the future. (Given the impressions I came away with from constitutional-law class about the two partial-birth-abortion Supreme Court cases, I can believe it. Roberts is a wily one—that is, according to some people’s interpretation of his actions.)
(Correction and updates below the fold.)
More on Obamacare
April 3, 2012
Mark Steyn, as usual, is must-read material:
Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. . . . It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.
Enjoyment and Contemplation 