Looking Up 10-17-16
As the Obamacare ambulance falls off a cliff, with parts of the vehicle and even the patient flying through the air, The driver, Obama, cheerfully exclaims "Things are looking up!"
Obamacare's Days Dwindle Down
Obamacare's days are really and truly numbered. Problems with the law are reaching critical mass. So the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to prop up the system—and by "extraordinary," we mean illegal.
An inspector general report recently concluded that the Obama administration did not have the authority to give insurers billions in tax dollars to keep them docilely participating in the flawed insurance exchanges created by the law.
So the administration came up with a dubious and desperate tactic to pay off insurers—they would take an obscure Treasury fund designed to pay off lawsuits against the government, encourage insurers to sue for losses incurred as the result of their poorly designed law, and then quickly agree to a massive settlement. In the wake of the inspector general report and public grumbling, the administration seems to be backing off of that plan. No surprise, then, that a number of major insurers, with mounting losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, pulled out of Obamacare over the summer.
How bad are things? Bad enough that liberals, who have previously done backflips pretending that Obama's key policy "achievement" is something other than a giant failure, are now openly critical of Obamacare. A recent article on page one of the New York Times matter-of-factly reported that "Mr. Obama's signature domestic achievement will almost certainly have to change to survive. . . . [H]ealth plans in the individual insurance market are still too expensive and inaccessible."
While this raised some eyebrows, it was nothing compared with what former President Bill Clinton just said. Out campaigning for his wife, he had this to say about Obamacare: "So you've got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It's the craziest thing in the world." The next day he tried to walk back his remarks a bit, but even then he still said the law is hurting "small-business owners and employees." The day after that, Chelsea Clinton said at a campaign stop, "we do need to work on the 'affordable' part of the Affordable Care Act."
Bill is simply doing Hillary—and the rest of the Democratic party—a favor here. Obama took crushing losses in midterm elections where the GOP beat the law like a drum. Should Clinton win, she will take office as a much less popular president than Obama was, and one possible way to avoid another midterm bloodbath would be to take Obamacare off life support.
That raises another question. What would the abandonment of Obamacare mean for Obama's legacy? It would mean an epic policy failure to add to the weakest economic recovery from a recession since the end of World War II and a foreign policy that's a goat rodeo. In a word, abysmal.
Fortunately, Politico reports that he's working to preserve his legacy in other tangible ways. The first lady's vegetable garden, which is allegedly "recognized globally as a symbol of local food," was recently ensconced in steel and concrete structures "as a way to dissuade, say, a President Donald Trump from scrapping it the way Ronald Reagan tore out Jimmy Carter's solar panels after he moved into the White House." Obviously, fixing the economy, seeing Obamacare repealed, and ensuring U.S. foreign interests aren't steamrolled by homicidal mullahs are the most important priorities post-Obama. But if a future president decided to, say, order up a backhoe from the GSA and install a putting green where the garden was, we can't say we'd care.
An inspector general report recently concluded that the Obama administration did not have the authority to give insurers billions in tax dollars to keep them docilely participating in the flawed insurance exchanges created by the law.
So the administration came up with a dubious and desperate tactic to pay off insurers—they would take an obscure Treasury fund designed to pay off lawsuits against the government, encourage insurers to sue for losses incurred as the result of their poorly designed law, and then quickly agree to a massive settlement. In the wake of the inspector general report and public grumbling, the administration seems to be backing off of that plan. No surprise, then, that a number of major insurers, with mounting losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, pulled out of Obamacare over the summer.
How bad are things? Bad enough that liberals, who have previously done backflips pretending that Obama's key policy "achievement" is something other than a giant failure, are now openly critical of Obamacare. A recent article on page one of the New York Times matter-of-factly reported that "Mr. Obama's signature domestic achievement will almost certainly have to change to survive. . . . [H]ealth plans in the individual insurance market are still too expensive and inaccessible."
While this raised some eyebrows, it was nothing compared with what former President Bill Clinton just said. Out campaigning for his wife, he had this to say about Obamacare: "So you've got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It's the craziest thing in the world." The next day he tried to walk back his remarks a bit, but even then he still said the law is hurting "small-business owners and employees." The day after that, Chelsea Clinton said at a campaign stop, "we do need to work on the 'affordable' part of the Affordable Care Act."
Bill is simply doing Hillary—and the rest of the Democratic party—a favor here. Obama took crushing losses in midterm elections where the GOP beat the law like a drum. Should Clinton win, she will take office as a much less popular president than Obama was, and one possible way to avoid another midterm bloodbath would be to take Obamacare off life support.
That raises another question. What would the abandonment of Obamacare mean for Obama's legacy? It would mean an epic policy failure to add to the weakest economic recovery from a recession since the end of World War II and a foreign policy that's a goat rodeo. In a word, abysmal.
Fortunately, Politico reports that he's working to preserve his legacy in other tangible ways. The first lady's vegetable garden, which is allegedly "recognized globally as a symbol of local food," was recently ensconced in steel and concrete structures "as a way to dissuade, say, a President Donald Trump from scrapping it the way Ronald Reagan tore out Jimmy Carter's solar panels after he moved into the White House." Obviously, fixing the economy, seeing Obamacare repealed, and ensuring U.S. foreign interests aren't steamrolled by homicidal mullahs are the most important priorities post-Obama. But if a future president decided to, say, order up a backhoe from the GSA and install a putting green where the garden was, we can't say we'd care.
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