Best of the Web, 2012: Obamacare  (Return to Main)

1) The Top Ten Worst Things in Obamacare: Number 8 might be the worst, but they are all frightening.

2) The Supreme Court recently granted Congress far-reaching new taxing authority through its Affordable Health Care Act decision. In the long-term, this is a frightening expansion of power. In the short-term, both parties raced to define the implications of the individual mandate: Is it a tax or just a penalty? Well, actually, it’s both. And Americans probably don’t care much what the mechanism government uses to collect fines is called. The mandate’s penalty already bears the spiritually pleasing, socialistic euphemism “shared responsibility payment,” and that tells us all we know need to know about the Act’s deceptiveness and intent.

3) Opting Out of ObamaCare: In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee predicted that the new Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. It was $110 billion. In 1987, Congress estimated that Medicaid’s hospital subsidies were estimated to cost less than $1 billion in 1992. It was $17 billion. That’s just two of countless examples.

4) John C. Goodman: Why the Doctor Can't See You: The demand for health care under ObamaCare will increase dramatically. The supply of physicians won't. Get ready for a two-tier system of medical care. In the next several years concierge medicine will grow rapidly, and everyone who can afford one will have a concierge doctor. We will quickly evolve into a two-tiered health-care system, with those who can afford it getting more care and better care. In the meantime, the most vulnerable populations will have less access to care than they had before ObamaCare became law. [Thanks? Obamacare!]

5) Apart from cures that will never be invented, liberal elites will be mostly untouched by the rotten medical care to which they are consigning the rest of us. Note how Democrats' friends, such as government unions, immediately received waivers from Obamacare. Rich or connected liberals, such as George Soros, Warren Buffett, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, will always have access to the best doctors, just as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez do. It is similar to the way that Democrats, who refuse to pass school choice, always seem to bypass the disastrous public schools for their own children, who end up at Sidwell Friends or St. Albans.

6) The rest of us are forced to live in a lawless universe of no new pharmaceuticals, foreign doctors, gay marriage, girl soldiers, a health care system run by the post office, and bankrupt Social Security and Medicare systems, because liberals can't enjoy their wealth unless other people are living in squalor.

7) Analysts: Obamacare Tax penalty to hit nearly 6 million uninsured people

8) It's a common refrain among those who lust to increase government's size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn't go far enough.

9) Should Obama gain a second term, he is virtually assured "an unlimited power to tax" beyond the limits free enterprise can bear. The outcome of the next election will be either a sunrise or sunset on Liberty.