By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 01, 2013
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist
Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands
instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring
froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters
went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If
you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan.
Period.”
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare:
(a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President
Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent
out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered”
exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington
regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No
maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing
far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the
nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with
individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage.
And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose
their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big
lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander
president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS
scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the
Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of
Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which
he is the nominal head.
I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping
is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally
regulated and standardized national health insurance.
Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim
sure to be exposed as factually false?
The same way he maintained for two weeks that false
narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it.
And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for
a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.
Look at how the New York Times covered his “keep your
plan” whopper — buried on page 17 with a headline calling the cancellations a
“prime target.” As if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear
to any outside observer — say, The Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave
the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer.
(b) Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of
which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan,
explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We
have a better idea.
Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for
the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to
know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled.
Because what you really need is what our experts have
determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity
care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy
28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for
bells and whistles for which he has no use.
It’s Halloween. There is a knock at your door. You hear:
“We’re the government and we’re here to help.”
You hide.
(c) As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles
aren’t just there to festoon the health-care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing
freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to
overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people.
Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent
American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you
do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage
requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.
So that your president can promise to cover 30 million
uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was
the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of
modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives
for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.
And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium
raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real
meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor —
best, by subterfuge.
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