By now it’s abundantly clear that there is not an honest bone in the Obama administration’s body; as Mary McCarthy said of fellow traveler Lillian Hellman, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘a” and ‘the’.” Everything with these people is a bait-and-switch, and nothing more so than their “signature achievement,” the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
From the start, it was clear that the “health care” law had nothing to do with health care. It barely had anything to do with insurance, although it was “sold” to a minority of the American people — but to a majority of their elected representatives in the Democratic party — as if the two are somehow related. Rather, the act was a naked power grab by the federal government, rescued from its blatant unconstitutionality by the timely intervention of Chief Justice John Roberts, who buckled to administration pressure and discerned a “tax” in the emanations from a penumbra wrapped inside a riddle behind the Sphinx’s left ear. Even with itself, it was dishonest from the start.
And so the White House has pulled its now-shopworn thief-in-the-night act, not once but twice: first with its by-the-way “delay” of the employer mandate for a full year, and now with its don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to the eligibility requirements for Uncle Suger’s subsidies in the state exchanges. “Stated income” may be no good in the mortgage market any more after it crashed the system, but apparently it’s good enough for the Obama bureaucracy, whose faith in the honesty of the mendicant citizenry is touching if historically misplaced.
This all may be due to the bumbling incompetence of an administration long on ideology, bristling with hostility, short on intellectual diversity, and absolutely devoid of a moral compass, but I don’t think so. I think it’s exactly what they’ve hoped and planned for all along: that the faster they wreck the system, Cloward-Piven-style, the faster they’ll get to the “single payer” (i.e., you) mechanism they’ve wanted all along. And then we, too, like all those East Bloc countries where I spent so much time from the 40th anniversary of the Dresden firebombing in 1985 in the old DDR to the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev in the old USSR, can say: At least we have “health care.” Freedom, not so much, but you can’t effect “fundamental transformation” without breaking a few shibboleths.
The larger issue is what’s compelling a sizable swath of the political class to constantly insist that things are “broken” and that they must be fixed right this minute, especially in the Senate (the supposedly more deliberative body), where soulmates like Chuck Schumer and John McCain rush around with their hair on fire, pushing “health care” reform and discerning ominous undocumented shapes lurking in the shadows. When a used-car salesman tells you have to take his manager’s just-for-you deal right now, a sensible person walks away. In Cloward-Obama America, we continually reelect such hucksters to Congress. And nothing ever changes, including the fierce urgency of change.