No Wasted Crisis

To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, a good crisis should not go to waste. The roll out of Obamacare certainly qualifies as a major crisis, on multiple fronts, and it's not just the website. Nancy Pelosi famously said that we had to pass the bill to find out what's in it. Not exactly, Nancy.  The real learning experience, at least for the American people, is when those cancellation notices start arriving and we find out that the President apparently had his fingers crossed when he told us we could keep our exisiting insurance plans. The back peddling has been world class as the Administration scrambles to stay out in front of what is starting to become a disaster of epic proportions.

It seems as though he meant to say that you could keep your old plan if that plan meets all the mandates under the new law. A huge "If". And even though millions of Americans had been doing just fine with plans that fit their needs for coverage and deductibles, we now find out that these plans are actually sub-standard products being pedaled by unscrupulous insurance companies. Who knew?

Good Question. It turns out that those crafty little devils that designed Obamacare knew all along that the new law would trigger mass cancellations which would force people to go to the Exchanges for a "legal" replacement policy. Yesterday,a Forbes article spills the beans that the according to a report in the June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials were predicting "massive disruption in the private insurance market", and even more shocking, this chaos would include the "market for employer-sponsored plans". It looks like an estimated that 93 million Americans are suddenly finding themselves in the ACA's path of destruction. At this point, the hard core Koolaid-sippers are getting ready to say how Obama didn't know about this, which only adds to the increasingly voluminous subjects that our putative brainiac president didn't know about.

When we started writing this post, the theme was going to be that the crisis of the ACA might have a silver lining in that it might help more of the average Americans to finally wake up to the long-term dangers of the Progressive agenda. After more than a hundred years of mission creep, this movement has been chipping away at our freedom under the promise that the technical experts of the administrative state can run our lives better than we can. Under ACA, you are going to be forced to buy insurance that you may not want, with mandated coverages that you may not desire and at an increased cost that will throw a big wrench into many family's monthly budgets. But now, as we discover more and more about this orchestrated lie fest, the concerns may well be turning from one of concern over the government's inept administration to a concern about an organized program of mis-information. All things being equal, I think we would rather deal with incompetence.

In the interest of full disclosure, we were concerned that congressional Republicans made a mistake when they chose to make the de-funding of the ACA as their main negotiating point during the recent government shutdown. We are now coming to realize that they were spot on. This legislation monster needs a stake through its heart.