All of Barack Obama’s phony rhetoric about how wonderfully the Affordable Care Act is chugging along means less than nothing compared to the cold reality that awaited the employees of a Pennsylvania company, as a local news station captured their stunned reactions to ObamaCare price hikes in real time.
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These people did nothing wrong. They committed no crime. They just sat down to talk with their benefit manager, who might as well have been wearing a black robe and carrying a sickle, and learned they’d be facing premium hikes of over 30 percent, with higher deductibles. Even their co-payments for doctor visits have doubled. And the numbers hitting these good people aren’t as bad as the premiums and deductibles slamming into other ObamaCare victims around the country. The great second wave of damage in the larger group insurance market is about to get under way.
“I don’t know how President Obama thinks he’s helping us,” one employee sighs, “because we can’t afford this, we can’t afford to pay these co-pays, to pay these deductibles on what we’re making.”
Another repeats the sarcastic but accurate observation made by ObamaCare critics since day one: “there’s nothing affordable” about the Affordable Care Act. It is observed that average people can’t just cough up three hundred dollars a month, because that’s a big chunk of a rent check or mortgage payment. One shell-shocked woman, looking at a $400 monthly premium increase plus a $4000 deductible, confesses she has no idea how she’s going to pay it.
Unsurprisingly, that never occurred to the high-rolling bureaucrats and congressional dinosaurs who drafted this plan. Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the chief ObamaCare perps, is about to retire after rolling into Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He doesn’t think three hundred bucks is a lot of money. He’s not going to be forced to choose between paying Obama’s tax increases and making his rent.
Needless to say, none of these people will be invited to come on stage with President Obama and talk about their ACA experiences. They’re learning the hard way that political control of an industry means distant commissars picking winners and losers. You can do everything right and still get socked by the biggest middle-class tax increase in history, because the imperial President and his court have decided other people need lower premiums, and you must be squeezed to pay for it. We were far better off under the rule of old-time monarchs, because they didn’t try to weigh, measure, and cut everyone’s life. You could hide from medieval royalty and hope they didn’t notice you, but there’s no hiding from King Barack and his vast army of bureaucratic retainers.
The GOP has been harvesting video clips like this from around the country, as the reality of ObamaCare hits people like Freddy Krueger jumping out of their birthday cakes. Another one chronicles “doc shock” hitting people in Tennessee, as they discover their expensive ObamaCare policies are nearly “worthless,” as one mother with an injured teenage daughter put it.
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This lady won’t be getting any invitations to come on stage with the President either. She won’t be getting any shout-outs at State of the Union addresses. But that’s how socialism works, always. The socialists choose some valued constituents to shower with benefits, declaring that all of American life must be restructured on their behalf, holding them as hostages when reformers point out the plan isn’t working. The people whose lives are ruined by the plan are dismissed as insignificant anecdotes, their travails a small price to pay for achieving socialist goals. A few sympathetic winners are spotlighted at media events; the losers are left to suffer in silence; neither groups have much individual control over what happens to them.
It’s easy to dream up a trillion-dollar program that can put a handful of happy people behind the President at photo ops, or give him three or four names to rattle off at State of the Union addresses. If you can keep the far larger group of suffering Americans quiet and subdued – tell them they have no hope of escape, no way to politically organize and change things for the better – you might just get away with it. Private enterprise has to satisfy its customers. Big Government merely has to keep dissenters from accumulating the political strength necessary to overcome its defensive screen of dependents, and carry out the nearly impossible task of repealing a massive federal program. The difference in results between the two approaches is about what you’d expect, if you’ve been thinking clearly since 2009.
