It’s been more than a week since Democrats passed healthcare legislation which inflicts grotesque modifications on the United States of America.  People who love and admire this country are aghast—people who hate and despise this country are thrilled.

This is not the normal political difference of opinion.  This is serious, Civil War-type stuff, because the Affordable Health Care for America Act changes the nation every bit as significantly as the secession of South Carolina on December 20, 1860.

As I’ve watched the gloating and self-congratulations from liberals over the last nine days (Does Nancy Pelosi cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West or what?  I’d bet my last dollar the woman has flying monkeys on staff somewhere.)… hmm, where was I?  Oh yeah, I’ve compiled a list of ten reflections on the atrocity called Obamacare.

1.  Why don’t people see or care about the fundamental issues?

Watching my fellow Americans who support this legislation—and there are a few, hard as that is to believe—I am stunned and amazed that they care nothing about the loss of freedom and loss of privacy they are about to experience.  I talk constantly about the inadequate educational system in this country but watching the millions of morons who have somehow reached adulthood without ever being taught that freedom has value and that intrusive government is something to be feared, the totality of this educational failure stuns me.

How do teachers manage to usher the little slugs through thirteen years of school without covering the dramatic repressions and mass murders of the 20th century?  Nearly all of which occurred at the hands of leftwing socialist and communist governments?

2.  Divisiveness

Barack Obama has built a long list of broken campaign promises in his first year so mentioning another blatant lie is anticlimactic.  Nevertheless, remember how he promised to end the partisanship and do things differently in Washington?  I am 56 years old and I have never seen a more bitterly partisan effort than this.  Democrats ignored and dismissed every healthcare idea and argument that Republicans presented for over a year, until Obama finally invited them to a “bipartisan healthcare summit” in March of 2010, whereupon he ignored and dismissed their ideas and arguments all over again while filibustering his way through a series of factual errors and illogical conclusions that made many people wonder if he’s even sane.

Remember this: more Americans identify themselves as conservative than identify themselves as liberal so the president just ignored most of his fellow citizens for the benefit of his personal socialist yearnings.

3.  The lies uttered by the president while promoting this bill

No president has ever acted like this.  As I explained back on February 2 in a column about his State of the Union speech, while campaigning for office politicians are usually forgiven for garnishing the truth, exaggerating their accomplishments, finessing the facts, and promising shit they can’t possibly deliver.  But once elected president they are supposed to represent all Americans and are supposed to muster up some affection for the truth.

President Obama is willing to say anything, even stuff that is so obviously untrue it would cause a used-car salesman to blush, and he pulled out all the stops this month while campaigning for healthcare legislation.

He said it would save money.  That’s a lie.  It does not save money.  How could it?  The very idea is absurd.  Everybody knows we can’t spend an extra three trillion dollars on healthcare and save money.  Of all his lies, this is the most egregious and most damaging because healthcare legislation will inevitably bankrupt the nation just like similar healthcare plans have done to other nations and just like a similar plan enacted in 2006 is currently doing to Massachusetts.

He said people won’t lose their present insurance or their doctor.  That’s a lie.  Millions of us will lose both.  We will lose employer-provided insurance plans when some employers choose to end their plans and throw us into the government exchange—because it’s cheaper—and we will lose our doctors because many of them will not accept the new reimbursement rates from Medicare and Medicaid.  Other doctors have threatened to quit the profession altogether rather than become glorified government employees.  The CBO estimates that 10 million of us will lose our current employer-provided insurance and a private study estimates the number could be as high as 119 million of us.  Every time Obama uttered this falsehood he knew he was lying because the CBO estimate has been out since last year.

He kept using real-life patients as examples, and every time he provided a human example he twisted the facts and withheld the pertinent details which showed that Obamacare actually does nothing for them.  What does that tell you when the Democrats pass a multi-trillion-dollar entitlement program and cannot find one single example of a person who will benefit from it?  During his healthcare campaign he flew to Ohio specifically to use a woman named Natoma Canfield as an example.  Ms. Canfield stopped paying her insurance premiums when she couldn’t afford them, now she has leukemia, and she is worried about losing her home because of the medical bills.  Unmentioned by Obama was the fact that Obamacare does nothing for her until 2014, by which time she’ll be cured or dead, and unmentioned was the fact that she is currently being treated in one of the best charity hospitals in the world and was in no danger whatsoever of losing her home.  The whole story was a shameless lie.

He insisted both before and after the legislation passed that Obamacare will immediately ensure that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to children with preexisting conditions.  Another lie.  A congressional spokeswoman was forced to correct the president but unfortunately she didn’t correct him until after the legislation was signed.  Gee, nice timing on the correction, lady.  Where were you with that correction before the legislation passed, when the president was crisscrossing the country repeating the lie?  (As I am posting this online Obama is furiously trying to cobble up some kind of fix for this lie.)

He also kept saying that Americans were being bankrupted by medical bills, and as I showed in a column way back in August of 2009, with sources, medical bills are not causing Americans to go bankrupt.  Bankruptcies because of medical bills are a purely mythical concoction by dishonest politicians trying to sell Obamacare to the public.

4.  Typical in-crowd exemptions

Turns out the legislation is worded in such a way that it exempts congressional leadership staffers from having to participate in the “exchanges” that the legislation sets up for ordinary, working-stiff, taxpaying suckers.  Who wrote that wording?  Why, those very staffers who are exempted, of course.

5.  The myth of the pro-life Democrat

(Phyllis Schlafly coined this phrase in a March 21 column.)  For years it’s been obvious to conservatives that there is no such thing as a pro-life Democrat, and the gradual collapse of the bloc of “pro-life” Democrats led by Bart Stupak exposed this truth once and for all.  In November when the House passed its version of the healthcare bill, Stupak was one of 41 Democrats in the bloc, and they managed to attach the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the bill thereby prohibiting the use of federal funds in any form from being used to pay for abortions.

The Senate version of healthcare legislation had no such prohibition and when Congress reconvened in January Stupak was adamant that his coalition of “pro-life” Democrats would never accept the Senate version because of the abortion issue.  Nevertheless, by February 24 the 41 had dwindled to “15–20,” and a few days later Stupak was only claiming 12 “pro-life” Democrats.  A couple weeks later it was down to 6.  On March 21, when the House finally voted, not one single Democrat, not even Stupak himself, voted against the bill.

To help him save face, Obama promised an executive order but the wording of the executive order is not constructively different than the legislation itself and executive orders do not legally overrule legislation anyway so this whole face-saving maneuver was a sham.

There is no such thing as a pro-life Democrat.  Of the 41 who pretended to be pro-life in November, not one cared enough about unborn babies to resist the financial bribes and political threats they received.  Not.  One.  Single.  Democrat.

6.  The utter failure of socialized medicine

I pointed out in two columns last year—August 8 and August 26—that American healthcare is by far the best in the world.  Meanwhile, endless stories are available telling us about the utter failure of socialized medicine around the world, including the failures of our own Medicare which faces impending bankruptcy and resistant doctors.  No matter how many times people were told about desperate Canadians crossing the border to get treatment, Englishmen being killed by negligent nurses or kicked out of the system for buying their own medicine, Cubans rotting in worm-infested hospitals, and healthcare bankrupting France, our brilliant politicians decided to tear apart the system that works and copy the systems that don’t work.

One thing about socialists, they can never be honest about their intentions because they know the facts are against them.  One glaring example of this dishonesty is that Democrats are still calling the product we will now be forced to buy “health insurance.”  Good grief.  Every time one of them utters this inanity, I practically barf.  If the companies selling the “insurance” cannot decline people who are already sick, then THAT IS NOT INSURANCE YOU LYING BASTARDS!  If you already have cancer, you don’t need insurance, you need medical care.  Expensive medical care.  By forcing the health insurance company to give you coverage you are forcing them to pay for your expensive medical care, and the concept of “insurance” has nothing to do with the transaction.

Imagine letting people wait until their house is on fire to buy home insurance or waiting until their car is totaled to buy car insurance.  Find me one Obamacare supporter who can explain why every rational American will not simply refuse to buy “health insurance” until they are sick, thereby saving themselves the cost of premiums until they actually need healthcare.  Duh.

7.  The left causes the problems and then wants to solve them

This is their favorite tactic.  They chip away at the free market until they create enough problems that people become convinced something needs to be done and then the socialists jump in with an even larger dose of the free market restrictions that caused the problems in the first place.  (Like what they’re currently doing to the financial system and the mortgage market.)  Although American healthcare works remarkably well, there are obvious problems caused by government interference.  Why anybody with half a brain would think that more government interference would solve those problems is a question for God in heaven.  I certainly don’t have an answer.

If you doubt the power of the free market, simply compare medical procedures which operate outside the influence of government with procedures controlled by the government.  Which has shown more improvement and dramatically declined in price over the last two decades, laser eye correction or hospital radiology?  Why do you suppose that is?

8.  “What does it mean to you?”

Whenever I meet somebody who says they supported healthcare legislation, I ask, “Why?  What does it mean to you personally?”  I have yet to get an answer, let alone an accurate answer.  Supporters have no idea what Obamacare does or when it does it, they just swallowed the Democrats‘ sales pitch whole.

9.  Pell Grants?  Really?

For some weird reason, the Democrats threw verbiage dealing with education into this already-gargantuan bill, and consequently in the middle of the healthcare legislation we have a government takeover of the student loan program and an increase in Pell Grants, which are college scholarships for minority students.  WTF?

10.  An aftermath of phony threats

After they bullied and connived and cheated Obamacare into law, Democrats faced an understandable outpouring of anger from Americans who were not amused by their various shenanigans.  The reaction of liberals was to accuse political opponents of terrorist threats, spitting, racial and homophobic epithets, and general ill-mannered and icky behavior.  Not one of their accusations has been substantiated and a number of them have proven to be concocted.

Congressman Tom Perriello claimed that Tea Partiers were trying to kill his brother by cutting a propane hose.  But the hose was outside, the hose that went to a backyard gas grill, and there is no evidence that any Tea Party person was anywhere near the place.  What’s more, the congressman’s brother has cut the damn thing a few times himself by running over it with his lawnmower, so it apparently isn’t a life-threatening matter.

Congressman Russ Carnahan claimed that evil conservatives threatened his life by dumping a coffin in his front yard and leaving it there as a warning.  Turns out they brought a baby-sized coffin as a prop for a prayer vigil because of his vote for abortion-friendly Obamacare, and when they were done praying they loaded up the prop and took it away with them.  A man with a less-guilty conscience might have stepped outside and joined the prayers instead of feeling threatened by them.

Although, on second thought, maybe Democrats should feel threatened by prayers.

It was claimed that congressmen John Lewis, Andre Carson, and Emmanuel Cleaver were called the “n” word and spat on outside the Capitol, but strangely none of the protesters heard any such thing, and Cleaver—the one allegedly spat on—eventually backed off the spitting claim, downgrading it to a case of accidental spraying when police questioned him.  This gets even stranger when you learn that Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., and another member of the Black Caucus were shadowing the group with video cameras pointed primarily at the crowd, apparently trying to provoke and obviously hoping for a racial epithet or threat of violence, and ended up getting neither on tape.  Nor did they get any spitting on tape.

Did somebody make the whole thing up?  You be the judge.  Far be it from me to accuse politicians of lying...

Speaking of lying politicians, Tea Party activists confronted Barney Frank in a House corridor, and while he was arrogantly declining to engage them in discussion a strange man nobody in the Tea Party group knew or had ever seen before that moment walked up, called Frank a faggot, and then quickly walked away.  Naturally, Frank immediately blamed this epithet on the Tea Party.  Color me cynical, but as a long-time observer of the unethical and dishonest Barney Frank I think this was more likely a setup arranged by the congressman himself.

What better way to demonize and marginalize your political opponents than by phonying up some uncivil behavior, blaming it on them, and then playing the victim role?  At the very least you will distract the idiots in the mainstream media from the real issue of the irreparable harm you just did to the nation.

Cue Katie Couric.  Time for another hit piece on the Tea Party, Katie.


From Reno, Nevada, USA

March 31, 2010 - Hello, it's me again! Ok, Health Care-less Bill/law whatever you want to call it is just another ponzi/pyramid scheme with lots and lots of favors built in without so much as one increase in the seats a medical student could find in a medical school. I am not a brain surgeon here but wouldn't building more Medical Schools so more of the brain children out there could move along into Doctordom thereby increasing the supply of doctors against the supply of sick people therefore bringing down the cost of health care through an old theory called supply and demand? Or, is that just too simple a solution? Same goes for Hospitals.. Build more locations with more staff and suddenly these MedShacks have to start competing with each other for business which would also work with insurance companies if only the invisible line of territory were erased. I don't know, call me crazy, but when you flood the market with more product than can be absorbed by the free market prices/costs always seem to come down. I will be voting 100% Republican in November and can't wait to see what a 100% Republican House looks like. Will someone move the aisle? Just asking.... - LiAnne, Connecticut

March 31, 2010 - I am retired enjoyed reading the article and agree with it. Thanks for putting it out there. - J.H., Ohio

March 30, 2010 - Very good. - Mike, Grand Rapids, Michigan