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."

Guest Blog: Silent Night

Guest blogger Jason Tabrys of Painespeak.com shares his thoughts on the expiration of the Congressional COBRA subsidy:

Images of ivory towers. Of men and women fattened off the wealth of our labor, lackadaisical. They wake from their slumber and address the masses with promises of splendor and ease and then rumble back to their lavish suites uninspired to act with any sense of urgency. So long as they lay warm who is bothered by the cold? The Senate, the House, frozen, immobile like a glutton too overstuffed to rise from the table.

We have seen this all before, blustering and pontificating on the need to do something and then appropriately doing nothing until absolutely forced. How many Americans languished on the vine, desperately clawing their way to survival? Drowning victims praying that they would once again know air while the upper Senate debated and bickered over an unemployment compensation extension for months.

It seems yet again the mood of the Senate and House, is relaxed, while the reality for millions is anything but. Americans helped greatly by the COBRA subsidy that saw the Government pick up 65% of the health insurance premiums for those who had been laid off or otherwise lost their healthcare insurance are about to be thrust into a horrific position. Pay the full premium amount, a number that averages nearly 85% of the average monthly unemployment payout, or risk losing health coverage and be punished by future insurers who can charge exorbitant premiums and flat out deny coverage for pre-existing conditions for anyone who has been without insurance for a brief period.

With this crisis upon us Congress has done that which is typical, unleashing a mass of sound and fury signifying nothing. Bills have been proposed and are moving their way to the floor encased in Congress’ typical brew of quick dry cement and molasses. Nothing will happen before Congress takes yet another vacation to sip eggnog and bask in their good fortune. After all, they aren’t the poor souls whose cursed existences force them to rely on the timely help of elected officials for survival. One imagines the wheels of government might turn a little faster if there were more dedicated to stoking the fires.