Clusterfrack

Note: This is not a piece about drilling for natural gas.

The extraordinary events of recent weeks have prompted me to break my personal promise to retire from writing about politics. While these latest developments are unlikely to affect me very much in a direct sense, they will certainly intrude on the lives of my children and grandchildren.

First, let’s talk about ObamaCare. You might notice if you pay attention that Obama and his minions happily referred to the program by that name until it started to turn to crap. Now it is Administration and liberal policy to refer to it as The Affordable Care Act or the ACA. ObamaCare has been banned from the lexicon of the left.

The Democrats in the dark of night pushed through this monster, a radical confiscation of the US healthcare system, by numerous questionable tactics and without one Republican vote. Now the Dems are blaming the GOP for not helping them implement the law! This is the height of absurdity. Remember Pelosi’s famous line? “We have to pass the law to find out what’s in it.” Surprise! It’s like a piñata full of poisonous snakes.

In a brilliant article by Andrew McCarthy in the National Review Online called “The Scheme Behind the Obamacare Fraud,” McCarthy explains why Obama and his supporters lied repeatedly about the plan. Unless you’ve been living in a cave and eating roots and berries you have certainly heard the President assuring folks that “If you like your plan you can keep your plan. Period.” Turns out that was a big lie as millions of people got notices that their plans were cancelled. Obama tried to blame the insurance companies but that would not hold water because it was obvious that HHS had changed the rules. Everybody’s plan had to include buying Sandra Fluke’s contraceptives, abortions, prenatal care and maternity benefits among others. It didn’t matter if you were a 90-year-old male widower who hadn’t had an erection since the Carter Administration; you still had to have maternity benefits in your insurance. With all this added stuff, including accepting everyone with pre-existing conditions at the same price, only a career politician or a liar would assert, “… everyone would save an average of $2500 on their insurance costs.” You’re going to get more and pay less? Yet Democrat apologists continue to assert that people will get better plans on the exchanges for less money.

“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Says Obama again and again. Another lie and they knew it. Doctors are retiring in droves and are being dropped from group plans. More and more are refusing to see Medicaid and Medicare patients. Specialized hospitals and clinics like the Mayo Clinic and Seattle Children’s Hospital (where a couple of my grandkids go) are being cut out of group plans because under ObamaCare, group policies can no longer afford it. Which raises another question in my mind. Why are the insurance companies nailing together their own gallows and tying the noose for their own hanging? It’s pretty obvious that Obama intends to put them out of the health insurance business. They seem to be quietly walking to the scaffolds. Executives of these companies should be screaming their bloody heads off.

The most recent and seemingly unrelated story last week was Harry Reid’s decision to invoke the “Nuclear Option” and change over 220 years of Senate tradition by changing the rules such that instead of requiring 60 votes to approve a judicial or administrative appointment, only a simple majority would suffice. This allows the Democrat majority in the Senate to pack the DC Court of Appeals (and others) with liberal justices. Why is this important? The DC court is the only check on the rules issued by unelected bureaucrats in the EPA, HHS and other intrusive branches of government. It’s a power grab pure and simple. The Senate Democrats are pretty fearful that the voters are awakening from their slumber and realizing that they have been lied to by their Democrat rep and will likely take revenge in 2014.

Getting rid of the 60-vote requirement also allows the Obamaniks to appoint leftists to the IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. This outfit, beyond judicial review, will effectively have control over prices, reimbursement to doctors and, essentially, rationing. These guys are what Sarah Palin so accurately called “Death Panels”.

Speaking of Palin… perhaps you missed that Martin Bashir of ultra-liberal MSNBC decided that Ms Palin was not entitled to use the word “slavery” when referring to the national debt being accumulated in the name of our grandchildren. He was so angry about it that he said she should suffer the same fate as the punishment meted out by one of the world’s worst slave owners: That someone should urinate and defecate in her mouth. What did MSNBC have to say about this? How about NBC, the parent of MSNBC? Well, nothing. Not a single word. Paula Dean lost her career because she admitted in a courtroom that she may have used the word “nigger” at some point in the misty past but Bashir did not even get a reprimand.

Nor did NBC have anything to say about the collapse of the ObamaCare website or the millions having their heath care plans cancelled. No interest in the disaster of the $900 million flop of Healthcare.gov or the no bid contract to build it given to Michelle’s Princeton pal’s company. Total silence. If the major networks don’t mention it, it didn’t happen. The media has protected Obama since 2007 and the Obamas have reason to believe that policy will continue.

Speaking of lies and the media…Obama’s re-election hinged on several frauds as well. First, Benghazi. To perpetuate the myth that Obama’s policies had terrorism on the run they had to blame the Benghazi disaster on “a protest of an anti-Islamic video” when it was obviously a lie. Second: It is now clear that Obama used the IRS to harass and silence the Tea Party organizations around the US. Finally, Obama used the Census Department to fudge the numbers to put the unemployment figures below 8%. That, too, was a lie. But for those lies and the untimely arrival of Hurricane Sandy, there would be an honest man in the White House today and the economy would be booming. ObamaCare would not exist.

Getting back to the failing ObamaCare program… McCarthy asserts, and I agree, that it was designed to fail from the start. The “scheme” as he points out, is to get the US to a “single payer” system like Canada, the UK and other European socialist counties. Obama admitted as much in a speech in 2003 and again in a speech in 2007. More people are already being forced into Medicaid and Medicare. The cost and unsuitability of the policies being pushed on the young “invincibles” will not attract enough of them to make the economics of the program viable and perhaps a 150 million more people will lose their employer provided health care at the end of 2014 when the “grandfathering” runs out. With millions uninsured by the private market the liberals will be there with the solution: Government health care. ObamaCare is a carefully scripted program to get the US to a single payer system. To the leftists if lies, fraud and deceit are necessary to get there, so be it. The ends justify the means. If high cost, long delays for essential services, rationing and bureaucrats deciding who lives and dies are your thing, you’re gonna love it.

By the way, the Democrats in the faint hope to cover their asses in the 2014 elections have pushed the release of the costs for health policies for 2014 past the November elections. How cynical is that?