Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
If ObamaCare Is So Great...
If ObamaCare will be as great as the proponents claim, why is it that so many of those proponents have applied for, and received, waivers to be excluded from its benefits?
The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has the power to force us into ObamaCare. It also has the power to issue temporary waivers to permit some to stay out of ObamaCare. By the end of 2010, DHHS had issued 222 waivers to businesses and other organizations that provided something called ‘limited benefit’ plans. These typically are the plans made available to food service employees in places such as McDonald’s who otherwise would have no coverage, and for lower-paid and part-time employees. In quite a few cases, these waivers were also issued to labor organization who had applied for other reasons.
DHHS has just updated the online list of waivers granted. The number has now climbed to 729 employers, unions and other organizations that have been given a pass for now. Four states (Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee) have also received waivers from DHHS.
One-fourth of these waivers have been issued to labor unions that include the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, the Communications Workers of America union and the Service Employees International Union.
Of course, Big Labor was four-square behind ObamaCare. Labor pumped millions of dollars into the project, and ginned up ‘support’ from within its ranks so television news clips could show us just how popular this whole thing was.
On top of these ‘opt-outs’, we are beginning to hear congressional testimony conducted by the Republican committee heads that decry the claims made for ObamaCare by the earlier ruling party, as it rammed passage through using methods that would be hard to find in the former Soviet Union. Things that need to be enacted before people know what is contained in the thousands of pages are not often good for us. Things that need to be enacted in the dark of night aren’t usually good for us.
States are already struggling to find the money with which to pay for all the federal mandates for covering this or that or the other thing. Wisconsin is learning that it will have to find billions more dollars to pay for some of the costs of the expanded Medicaid program, and it isn’t alone.
This thing known as ObamaCare is not good for us. We are already short 130,000 primary care doctors in this country and we are about to exacerbate that problem with no relief in sight. We are watching as the current system is being dismantled piece by piece by czars no one elected using power granted en masse by a Congress that took “a shellacking” in the latest elections.
The effort to repeal, although well-intended, is not likely to go far given the current make-up of the Senate and the veto pen held by President Obama. It does serve to set the table, however, for some significant changes that will kill some of the onerous stuff and add some things that are sorely needed. Even President Obama appears to realize that will occur.
The campaign of deceit that was employed to cajole the nation into letting this happen is despicable. Most people still have no idea of what is held in these thousands of pages of law and the hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations being penned to make it all go forward. The campaign of deceit is still in high gear and being run by a handful of people, none of whom (with the exception of their appointer) have been elected to their position.
We know we will not be able to continue our present health plans if we desire. We know it will cost us more than we can imagine. We know that we will experience rationing; if not direct rationing (while that remains very likely), then certainly rationing by delays in treatment. That is simply going to happen with the doctor shortage we have and with the reduced fees paid to existing doctors.
Massachusetts, with its RomneyCare, is a classic example of what will occur and yet our elected officials refuse to learn from that failure. (By the way, that, in and of itself, is sufficient grounds for not voting for Mitt Romney.)
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