Obamacare disaster grows from present to future: James Varney/links
By James Varney, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune The Times-Picayune
on February 05, 2014
It's a new month in a new year and what does it bring? More of the same kind of bad news for the Obama administration.
As if the rollout debacle and ongoing questions about whether the information is flowing properly and protected weren't enough, the Congressional Budget Office this week reversed its once rosy predictions about Obamacare.
The CBO now presents a drastically different view of Obamacare's impact on the country and its economy than the one the CBO gave when the Affordable Care Act was being written and rammed home. Some have gone so far as to say if Obama has lost the Congressional Budget Office, he's lost the policy.
The truth, of course, is that the CBO was had by Obama. The figures it was forced to run prior to Congress voting on the law were phony. As requested, it ran the numbers for the next decade, even though everyone in Washington knew most of the costs of Obamacare were deliberately kicked down the road so as to protect Democrats at election time.
With much of that stripped away, the CBO has come back and, shockingly, said Obamacare will reduce labor by the equivalent of 2.3 million workers. While some stalwart liberals such as White House spokesman Jay Carney and at The Los Angeles Times have desperately spun that news as good, most people realize what it really means.
It means fewer jobs, lower productivity and less taxes flowing to Washington. A good deal of the loss the CBO chalks up to the deleterious effect of many wealth redistribution programs (always the beating heart of Obamacare), namely people calculating they are better off taking than working.
All told, the CBO estimates another trillion in debt in 10 years thanks to Obamacare.
In Louisiana, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-Baton Rouge), who is seeking to replace Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in November, jumped on the new figures. At the moment, Obamacare is a key, if not the main, part of the Republican electoral strategy to hold its majority in the House of Representatives and win on its still tough bet to take control of the Senate.
Cassidy's response was to be expected, but nationally even some dyed-in-the-wool liberals have had enough with the accounting chicanery that has always suffused Obamacare. Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, for instance, notes that Obamacare once survived off CBO reports and concludes logically it must also perish if those reports turn against the act.
The economically ruinous impact of Obamacare has always been obvious, but the CBO report also predicts that, despite the law's stated goal of providing health insurance to more Americans, at least 31 million will be without it in 10 years. Oddly enough, that's roughly the number of Americans the bill was supposed to help.
That inconvenient fact is the basis for John Podhoretz's takedown in The New York Post. The editors at National Review also highlight the absurd nature of spending trillions for no improvement in the number of insured.
Just how much the GOP will be able to capitalize on all this remains unclear, at least to me. For one thing, it's easy for Rep. Cassidy to call for new policies that improve insurance and add jobs; it's another to introduce specific bills. And everyone knows no Republican proposals have a chance of dodging an executive veto anyway.
On this point, it seems to me, the liberal Democrats have a case, because when the Republicans controlled the levers they did nothing. What the Democrats did was awful and unpopular, but a superior alternative must be offered in addition to criticism.
http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/02/obamacare_disaster_grows_from.html
My posts are for CONSERVATIVE PATRIOTS ONLY. If you are a liberal, socialist, communist, democrat, media parrot or sympathizer with the above, then your opinions are neither welcome nor worthy.
| 
