It's ObamCare's Birthday--And You Can Cry If You Want To

                 photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc

What if you gave a birthday party and no one came?

Even this grandstanding White House avoided any "celebration" of the two-year anniversary of the perversely called Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare.

Affordable? The Congressional Budget Office now finds the Obama health bill will cost a staggering $1.76 trillion (not $940 billion--which has hideous enough--according to the agency's earlier estimate) over 10 years.

Politico claims it knows why the public overwhelmingly opposes the left's version of health reform:

At the two-year mark Friday, nearly everything that Democrats believed about the politics of health care has turned out to be false. And the cost of those miscalculations has been huge. They have haunted Obama’s presidency, soured business as usual at the Capitol and upended the conventional wisdom peddled by political strategists, who have rarely been so wrong about something so big.

Are you still wondering what is ObamaCare?

National Review's Yuval Levin expounds on ObamCare's unhappy birthday that goes beyond merely the imposition of the individual mandate:

This law is horrendously bad health-care policy, it rips at the fabric of our constitutional order and our economic order, it makes a joke of any notion of limited government, and it involves a faith in centralized expert management that is utterly disconnected from the realities of modern life. It is the culmination of the liberal welfare state in every respect, and it was enacted just as the failures of that welfare state were becoming most plainly and painfully apparent. It stands to exacerbate and accelerate all of those failures, and so to make the crisis our country faces far more urgent and grave...

What’s wrong with Obamacare begins with the basic vision of government and of American life that underlies it, and is evident in every provision, every new unrestrained regulatory power, every new agency and subagency, every assault on individual liberty, basic economics, and simple common sense in the law. Very little of it bears much relation (or could really, given the nature of our health-care system) to anything any state has done.

Levin's article also cites a law school professor who claims that "Millions of people (e.g., those who make 401% of the poverty line – $43,000 for a single person) will be forced to pay up to $18,000 a year for health insurance without any tax credits or cost-reduction payments."

If this is accurate, affordable care is going to make a lot of people sick.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the constitutionality of the one-size-fits-all individual mandate next week.

San Antonio Express-News columnist Jonathan Gurwitz sums it up well: "Our health-care system is deeply in need of reform. Obamacare is a cure, however, that is far worse than the disease. Stopping this exercise in constitutional malpractice now rests with the Supreme Court."