ObamaCare Going Down In Flames

From the San Diego Times Union: Is “what can go wrong, will go wrong” the slogan of Obamacare? If not, it should be.

Consider what’s happened the last week alone. First the White House announced that it was delaying for a year — until Jan. 1, 2015 — the Affordable Care Act mandate that employers with 50 or more workers provide health insurance. This is tantamount to admitting that implementing this key provision of Obamacare is going poorly and that if it were enforced, it would hurt Democrats in the November 2014 congressional elections.

Then Washington Post reporters surveying 600-plus pages of rules for Obamacare that were released in a classic late-Friday document dump came upon this jaw-dropper: In 16 states setting up their own health insurance “exchanges,” including California, those who sign up for heavily subsidized versions of Obamacare by declaring they are poor don’t even to have to prove it — they just have to “attest” to their income.

Given that we’re still struggling to recover from a deep economic downturn caused by a housing bubble that was partly driven by just such a trust-don’t-verify attitude on income, this is astounding. If you give people incentive to cheat, lots will cheat. So if millions more Americans receive subsidies than expected, what is the result? An explosion in the already-gigantic cost of Obamacare.

So why would the president think it acceptable to encourage mass cheating that rips off taxpayers? As with the delay of the employer mandate, there’s an obvious cynical motive. Giving away subsidized health insurance to anyone who asks for it is a way to goose participation in Obamacare and create the impression it is off to a fast start — with the aforementioned 2014 elections looming.

So what more can go wrong? The bad news is lots. It is inevitable, given the shabby, secretive way the massive law was put together.

Here’s a particularly ridiculous example: As the law is now written, it appears to give states an incentive to shift their retirement health insurance programs to Obamacare programs — at vast cost. The same holds for counties in California and the medical services they provide their jail inmates.

So much has gone so wrong so quickly with Obamacare that even past supporters are off the bandwagon or ready to jump. For the good of the country, the law should be scrapped. But considering the president still thinks it is his signature accomplishment, that is unlikely to happen.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/jul/08/obamacare-what-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong/