Obamacare’s Sticker Shock

Obamacare’s Sticker Shock November 14, 2013

 

I voted for Obama twice. After President George W. Bush foolishly led us headstrong, willy-nilly into an ill-conceived war I was eager to put anybody running against the GOP into office. At least I had the good sense to only vote for Bush the first term.

Yes, I am one of those independent-minded people who votes not with the party but with the candidate.

Am I sorry I didn’t put Mitt Romney into office?

No. Not at all.

But am I doubly-sorry that I did put Obama into office twice?

You betcha.

Listen, if the Bush administration orchestrated half the foul-ups the Obama administration has, the media would have driven Bush to market nekkid and squealing all the way.

Oh. Wait. That’s right. He did, and they did.

Institutional knowledge is such an onerous thing.

I could go on and on about the failed policies of Obama. His inability to get along with others, to invoke acrimony among the very people he was elected to lead. His arrogant willfulness to turn not one but two blind eyes to the abuses of the First Amendment by his own administration, all in the name of protecting us. Hear, hear, Thomas Hobbes.

And now – Obamacare. You don’t have to have a PhD to figure out that the reason healthcare is so critical to Obama is because of losing his mama at such an early age. In theory it’s a notable cause. I, too, think we are a rich enough nation to be able to afford healthcare for all.

Of course, it could be argued that healthcare wouldn’t be such a burden if we didn’t keep sending young men and young women off to fight other people’s wars, and bringing them home with missing limbs and shattered souls.

While waiting for a plane out of DC on Monday, I saw a young woman with all four limbs missing. She was standing on prosthetic legs with her prosthetic arms resting on her hips. She was waiting on somebody or something. I saw her later, walking through the airport, every step a struggle. Young women don’t lose all four limbs like that except to roadside bombs or IEDs. Had a car wreck mangled her like that her face would have been scarred and it was not. It was baby-butt perfect skin. My mama’s heart ached for this young woman. Earlier that day I walked past an African-American man sitting in a wheelchair near the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. He had no limbs and likely no genitalia from the looks of his injuries.

There’s a verse in Scripture about a man stirring up the waters about his own house. In other words, making his own troubles. We certainly seem to have a history of doing that as a nation. When will we get a clue and stop acting as the war-mongers our leaders have positioned us to be? You don’t see Congress lining up to volunteer to march off to war.

You won’t find them online signing up for Obamacare either.

They have good health plans, paid for with tax dollars.

Yours and mine.

Two of my four children are in that hurting place as a result of the disaster that is Obamacare. Responsible to their very core, they were already covered through private policies that they picked and paid for themselves. They had done their due diligence and researched different options. One of them has a small child who has to be covered as well. They already had affordable health care that covered things like immunizations and well-baby checks.

Under Obamacare, both girls will see their monthly healthcare cost double, while their coverage will decrease. And they aren’t the only ones. Check out this article in the LA Times.  In fact, both girls fall into that category where they won’t be covered at all until Obama’s people get the great cluster-fluck that is Obamacare straightened out.

Not that I have any hopes at all that’s ever going to happen. There is something Orwellian about this notion of entrusting our health care to the very same authority that has been spying on all of us.

What Obama hasn’t yet figured out is that this cluster fluck isn’t a matter of failure of technology. It isn’t a matter of a failure of information. It isn’t a matter of resistance from the GOP. Obamacare is a failure because of every other failure of this administration: It’s a failure of leadership.

Obama’s at his very best when he’s orating.

He’s at his very worst when it comes to implementing ideas.

This isn’t just about getting a website fixed. It’s about the burden we are putting on young families in tough economic times. Obama himself isn’t even aware of the problems he’s created for the rest of us.

The thing I can’t quit figure out is how a democracy allowed itself to be derailed by administrations like Obama and Bush, time and time again.

We are the nation of a government by the people, for the people, are we not? As I continually ask my students in First Amendment class, what injustice will cause you to set yourself aflame?

When are we going to demand better leadership from our elected officials?

What’s the point of a democracy if we just resign ourselves to being oppressed?

 

 

 


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