A really weird thing happened in Flint, Michigan on Monday: Bill Clinton criticized The [not so] Affordable Act just as Republicans have since 2010.
This blog said years ago that anyone who understood basic economics could predict exactly what would happen with the passage of Obamacare — and now the former president is on the campaign trail for his wife sounding like your friendly neighborhood blogger.
Here is what he said:
“You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.”
I worked for three different organizations since The [not so] Affordable Care Act was signed into law, and the cost of insurance plans spiked at all of them. Early on, I was trying to live inside the Beltway on less than $40,000 a year while trying to pay off students loans from USC and American University. (Try making that work with a morning commute into the city while paying rent.)
“The people that are getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies,” Mr. Clinton added at one point.
Indeed! I and millions of other hard-working Americans knew the feeling all too well. And, yes Mr. Clinton, I was working well over 60 hours per week at the time.
The funny thing is, the next step will be to call for a total takeover of the health care system by the federal government. Republicans claimed that Obamacare was a Trojan Horse for socialized health care, and they were called conspiracy theorists. But that is exactly what is happening.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sept. 13:
It looks like 2017 will be ObamaCare’s worst year yet. The three major insurers, along with many smaller plans, are largely exiting the health-insurance exchanges, leaving more than half of U.S. counties with only one or two health-plan choices, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Nearly 36% of ObamaCare regions may have only one participating insurance carrier offering plans for 2017, according to health-care analytics firm Avalere Health. Data from analysts at Barclays and Credit Suisse project that health-insurance premiums are expected to rise at least 24% in 2017.
To rescue President Obama’s health-care law, Hillary Clinton has proposed resurrecting the “public option.” This failed idea—a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers—can’t save ObamaCare. But introducing it across the country would move the U.S. much closer to the single-payer system progressives have always longed for. …
In 2011 Vermont tried to use this waiver process to introduce a public option, only to abandon it three years later when it became clear that the scheme would yield skyrocketing taxes on small businesses.
If you think health care is expensive now, then just wait until it’s “free.” And if you don’t think that will happen, then simply take a step into the the Douglas Ernst Blog Time Machine and consider the following: There will always be men like Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber on call for the next Democrat president.
Mr. Gruber told an audience at the University of Pennsylvania in November 2014:
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in — it made explicit the healthy pay in and the and sick people get money — it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
Yep. That actually happened — and it’s only a matter of time before the next “Gruber” gives it a shot with socialized health care.
Democrats like Jonathan Gruber need people to be stupid to get signature pieces of legislation passed. They want people to be stupid. Consider that as you walk into the voting booth in November, and then again when your Democrat neighbor bashes charter schools.
Related:
Harvard professors who championed Obamacare now livid over rising health care costs
Harry Reid acts as if the Internet doesn’t exist: ‘All’ Obamacare horror stories are untrue
Listen to Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber and then think about Obama’s call for Net Neutrality