This week marks the second birthday of ObamaCare, among the greatest legislative disasters in American history. By even the most conservative estimates, its costs are more than double what we were originally promised. It’s going to strip 20 to 50 million Americans of their health insurance, as overwhelmed employers decide the best course of action is dropping coverage altogether, with the resulting fines increasingly viewed as a wise investment to escape ObamaCare’s clutches. The President’s infamous promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it” has become a bitter joke, of the variety often traded across the Siberian snow.
ObamaCare has been causing health care costs to rise, and it will actually reduce our supply of doctors. It has already destroyed thousands of jobs, and it will soon unleash a fresh avalanche of job-killing taxes on job creators. It has destroyed religion and conscience, forcing Catholic institutions to pay for birth control, and even dropping an abortion surcharge upon everyone enrolled in plans that cover elective abortions.
Even as it devours American prosperity, liberty, and health, great festering chunks of spoiled legislation have been dropping from ObamaCare’s flanks. The CLASS Act is gone, as are some of ObamaCare’s most instantly repulsive feeding mechanisms, such as the scheme to force American small businesses to submit millions of 1099 tax forms every year. The House just voted to disable the death panels. Enraged Americans have watched Obama’s Health and Human Services Department issue thousands of ObamaCare waivers to politically connected businesses and labor unions. The Supreme Court is on the verge of striking down the very heart of ObamaCare - the individual mandate that gives Congress limitless power to force Americans to purchase politically approved goods from selected private firms - as the Constitutional outrage it so clearly is.
Meanwhile, lopsided majorities of Americans favor the complete repeal of ObamaCare, and have consistently done so for years. It might be the best sustained polling ever seen for a policy preference. The latest Rasmussen poll has Americans favoring repeal 57-39 percent. Strong support for repeal reached an eight-month high in the wake of Obama’s war on the Catholic Church. The Heritage Foundation has launched an online petition demanding ObamaCare repeal. If President Obama could somehow be persuaded to repeal the law, it would become, by a huge margin, the most successful job-creation initiative of his presidency.
Of course, that won’t happen… but it’s interesting to note that Obama doesn’t seem very eager to talk about his “signature achievement” any more. It’s swirling down the memory hole, along with those nostalgic sepia-toned photo-ops of the President touting Solyndra as one of the greatest successes of his trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill. Give Obama another month, with a few more points shaved off his poll numbers, and he’ll be claiming ObamaCare wasn’t his initiative per se. Actually, he’ll start doing that the moment Mitt Romney secures the Republican nomination. Isn’t it funny that the sole political value of this towering legislative triumph lies in convincing voters that RomneyCare is just as bad?
The Republican National Committee does what the Obama Administration refuses to do, and commemorates the second anniversary of this melancholy bill with a video birthday greeting. Raise a glass of your favorite government-approved healthy beverage (soon to become a mandatory purchase, under the next wave of “individual mandates”) and celebrate “ObamaCare’s Lonely Birthday.”
