We keep reading that Obama is suspending, delaying or possibly even eliminating Obamacare requirements, at least for favored parties and until after the 2014 Congressional elections. For the latest on this see, “It’s not just the employer mandate: Three Obamacare delays you haven’t heard about,” at washingtonpost.com, 7/8/13.
If Obamacare is such a good thing, then why must he do this?
If Obamacare is good for business, then why does most of the pressure to curb it, or apply it selectively, come from businesses?
I would think that if Obamacare were even 10 percent as magnificent as we’ve been led to believe, there would not even be a temptation to delay its implementation one more day.
Imagine if, at the start of the American republic, that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (our first four Presidents) had offered waivers or delays to implement the Bill of Rights. ‘Well, we have freedom of the press, but not until 1810, to give the people a chance to get it up and running.’
It’s absurd, of course. But to hear proponents of Obamacare talk about the law, you’d think it was at least as lofty and important, in principle, as the original Bill of Rights. They talk of a moral and political ‘right’ to health care, even claiming it’s implicitly embodied in the Constitution. OK, then. Why the delay?
Obama, and most of his supporters, live in an intellectual and psychological vacuum, at least on matters such as this. It’s a vacuum of willful non-questioning. It leads to an attitude of great hostility towards those who dissent, because dissension gets in the way of evasiveness. It’s a state of knowing self-deceit. It reminds me of the way a lot of people lead their lives, with predictable mediocre (or even disastrous) results.
It’s more than an academic issue. You cannot dismiss medical care as ‘just politics.’ Health care is one of the most important things there is. Ask anyone who has ever been sick, and survived to tell the tale. We’re about to impose a massive new law on doctors, nurses, surgeons and hospitals that is so confusing and restrictive that even the law’s strongest proponents cannot see fit to impose it’just yet.
Before Obama’s reelection, proponents of Obamacare could whine, ‘It’s those awful Tea Party types. They spread lies, and so we cannot act rationally so long as they’re allowed to speak.’ Well, we’ve all heard the news about the IRS singling out Tea Party advocates for special requirements. And I see no real influence of the Tea Party in Congress, since the Republican Speaker of the House barely pays them any attention, and certainly few or none of the Republican Senators do.
So what’s the excuse now, Obamacare supporters? You have what you want. You control the executive branch, the Supreme Court (on this issue at least), all of academia, and most of the media. Your dream law has passed, and it’s the law of the land. Even the Republican Speaker of the House has proclaimed it as such.
I understand the human phenomenon of procrastination. I realize people sometimes procrastinate on doing things they know, objectively, should be done, but that they don’t find pleasant to do. But that makes no sense here. Proponents of socialized medicine have waited almost a century for this to finally pass in the United States. Nobody stands in their way to block its implementation.
So again: why the delay?
The answer is obvious. Even the advocates of socialized medicine, including Obama himself, know it’s not practical. They’ve divorced the moral from the practical, and they believe socialism is morally superior and that’s all that counts. But how can something economically destructive be morally and socially superior?
Their mistake is to assume you can control costs and make medical care more rational by making it a guaranteed ‘free’ right. It’s like government passing a law that whenever you eat out, you must share the bill equally with the table dining next to you. If you order salads and they order fine steaks, no matter. Everyone is equal.
They can find no way to reconcile their uncritical belief in state-sponsored Big Government with practical, objective facts. Instead of facing up to facts and owning up to a mistake, they persist in their delusions and react with hostility to anyone who opposes them. Not that anyone is opposing them, not in the mainstream of media, academia or the government at this time.
As a magazine cover declared after Obama first rose to power, ‘We are all socialists now.’ Yes, indeed. So where’s the celebration amongst the victorious socialists?
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