Rant: Obamacare and Schadenfreude

Jonah Goldberg's latest at National Review is a delight to read. Some will say that we are rejoicing over others' suffering. I am not rejoicing over the suffering of those who have seen their premium skyrocket and their policies get cancelled. Granted, a large number (a majority, perhaps?) can certainly be said to have brought it on themselves--they did, after all, vote to re-elect Barack Obama to the Presidency and a Democratic Party majority in the Senate. Lesson learned? Perhaps, perhaps not. We'll see what 2014 brings.

But no, this set of just deserts is not the cause of conservative glee. I'm certainly sorry even for those who were duped into voting for Obama, and even for those who continue to insist that it still wasn't a mistake to re-elect him. I don;t want them to suffer, I just want them to not be in power, since they generally make bad decisions which the rest of us have to live with.

Here is the real source of conservative glee in all of this:

As a matter of public policy and fiscal health, this is a mixed bag. It’s good that poor sick people without insurance coverage are getting something. On the other side of the scale, we have the fact that the country is racing toward entitlement-fueled bankruptcy. So if you can overlook that, yippee!

But as a political and ideological matter, this is beyond fantastic. For years we’ve been told that Democrats were more “reality-based,” that “facts have a liberal bias,” in the words of Paul Krugman, and that if they could just have their way, they could fix all of our problems. No one represented this arrogant promise more than Barack Obama himself. But, with an irony so rich it would be made of Corinthian leather if it was a car seat, the only way he could get his signature legislation passed was to baldly and brazenly lie about it, over and over and over again. He created a rhetorical cloud castle where no one would lose his insurance, every family would save thousands of dollars, and millions of the uninsured would suddenly get coverage. Anyone who doubted this was called a fool or a liar, or even a racist. It was, in the parlance of liberalism, a “false choice” to assert that Obamacare couldn’t be a floor wax and a dessert topping.

It is indeed a very Christian sentiment, "How the haughty are brought low" (Isaiah 2:17, 5:15; Luke 1:52). And I can think of few people in living memory more haughty than President Obama, and to a lesser extent his enablers and their supporters. How many times during the "#Shutdown" were we told that Republicans just wanted to take Obamacare hostage by delaying it? That they should be made to kneel like good subjects before the throne of Barack Almighty, kiss his ring, and beg his forgiveness for opposing the Obamacare Bill?

And now, scarcely a month and a half later, all we are hearing from the Democrats in Congress is that we need some sort of delay for Obamacare. Suddenly they're suggesting that maybe we should hold off on the whole thing until it myriad "bugs"--a euphemism for the various unfortunate features and predictable if unintentional bad effects--can be fixed. That very suggestion was actually called "racist" when Republicans were making it.

My suggestion is that we scrap the whole damn thing, starting with the worthless and tyrannical HHS mandate, and nearly equally tyrannical though apparently Constitutional individual mandate. If we're going to require everyone to have healthcare insurance, we could at least be sensible in what we require the healthcare plans to cover--big and unexpected costs, emergency services (for true emergencies), perhaps a check-up/physical once per year. The rest should be at best optional. And if we're going to admit that the purpose the Obamacare is to subsidize debauchery and hedonism for Millenials (and beyond), that we should scrap the whole thing. It really is reasonable and fair to make people dig into their "beer money" to buy their own contraceptives, whether at $9/month (the actual cost) or $18k over 4 years (the claimed cost).

Then there's the fact that many American have lost their insurance--the insurance that they largely chose for themselves--to Obamacare in spite of the president's "promise" (really an outright lie) to the contrary:


The president and his administration have doubled down on this lie by first claiming that he "misspoke" when he made this promise, that he had never really made this promise. When he realized that people have a tough time believing that he misspoke when he uttered nearly the exact same phrase 36 times (or probably more), he switched to claiming that the insurance lost was "substandard." This apparently means that it didn't cover contraception and maternity leave for 70 year old men. That contraception coverage is crucial--why else would the penalty for not covering contraception/sterilization/some abortions be steeper than not providing any healthcare at all ($100/employee/day = ~36,500/employee/year for the former and $2000/employee/year for the latter)?

But in the meantime, it is certainly entertaining to sit back and watch our haughty president and his arrogant supporters squirm a bit. And not just because they have been lying repeatedly to the American people for the last several years.