Let’s Tee Up Obamacare, ‘the Worst Bill Ever’

If most Americans hate Obamacare already, wait till they see their healthcare bills in January. Big insurers, who strongly supported the Affordable Care Act Frankenstein they helped create, have notified customers that the biggest rate hikes ever are coming at the beginning of 2014. A friend of ours was informed just last week that the cost of his family plan will increase by 92 percent.  He got off easy compared to your editor. My wife and kids are on a high-deductible plan offered by Mutual of Omaha whose cost will nearly triple at the beginning of the New Year if we don’t take steps to keep our existing plan. Turns out the Obamacare version they would substitute covers maternity care and a variety of other services that we neither need nor want.

The changes will be hitting tens of millions of Americans in just three months, threatening to implode a tortured economic recovery that was already the weakest on record. Premium increases will come on top of staggering price hikes effected since Chief Justice Roberts personally sanctioned an Affordable Care Act that the Wall Street Journal once editorialized as “the worst bill ever.” It should be obvious to all by now why Obama is unwilling to modify it.  Clearly, it was never meant to improve the quality of health care in this country, but rather to redistribute income without imposing an explicit new tax on the middle class.  “The president’s health-insurance plan forces those who hire, work and produce to pay full price for health care, while creating generous discounts for practically everyone else,” noted an op-ed piece by Casey Mulligan last week in The Wall Street Journal.

Next Wave of Obama Redistribution

“This second redistributionist wave of the Obama era will follow a first wave of tax hikes, additional unemployment benefits, food-stamp expansions, waived work requirements for welfare benefits, etc. These measures were supposed to be temporary, intended to help people cope with the recession. The recession officially ended in mid-2009, but many of the administration’s measures continue,” wrote Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and the author of The Redistribution Recession.

With the foregoing mind, the Question of the Week invites you to tee up Obamacare and whack it with everything  you’ve got.  Based on personal experience, anecdote, hearsay fact, or anything else that helps make the point, why do you think that the Affordable Care Act really and truly is the worst, most economically destructive piece of legislative crud ever rammed down our throats?