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."

Fail: Long-Term Obamacare

CLASS dismissed.

When analysts who weren't blinded by ideology warned that the long-term care provision of Obamacare--which is called the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act--was fiscally unsustainable, they were just steamrolled in the mad rush to get the dreadful bill passed. A Democrat senator even called it a Bernie Madoff-style "Ponzi scheme" (terminology that later got Rick Perry in hot water in connection with Social Security), yet voted for it anyway.

But it turns out the the administration is abandoning the program:

The Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.

Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner explains:

Democrats structured the program to collect premiums for years before beginning to pay out benefits -- thus, it appeared to reduce the deficit when it would in fact greatly increase the deficit once it began making payments. As a voluntary program, it would become acutely unworkable if, as expected, only those in need of long term care signed up for it.

At National Review Online, Yuval Levin points out that "the the administration’s own [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] actuary said it would never work."

Levin adds that this is just one provision of the overall law that must be replaced by market-based insurance reforms:

This confirmation that Obamacare cannot in fact defy the laws of mathematics and accounting should serve as a warning regarding the implementation of the broader law, most of which would begin in 2014 if it is not repealed by then. The other major provisions of the statute are also grossly ill-designed. If it is permitted to take effect in full, the law will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.

Again, can anyone explain why any rational lawmaker operating in good faith could have voted for this bureaucratic monstrosity?

HotAir.com elaborates that the Democrats knew all along that the CLASS Act was a financial disaster but "no one on the Democratic side was willing to halt it before the bill passed because their fiction about 'bending the cost curve' was too precious to ObamaCare salesmanship."