Barack Obama’s promise to cure the ills of our health care
system was obviously an important factor in his 2008 victory over
John McCain as well as that year’s Democrat gains in the House and
Senate. Most of the electorate favored some legislation that would
slow rising medical costs and increase access to care. However,
when Obamacare finally slogged out of the congressional slough, it
was greeted with consternation and outrage. Instead of the reform
they were promised, the voters got a grotesque government behemoth
reeking of corruption. They were not amused. They appeared en masse
at town hall meetings to harangue their representatives, organized
a series of public protests and finally marched on Washington.
All for naught, of course. The President and his congressional
accomplices ignored the voters, patronizing them with the assurance
that they would learn to love “reform” once they understood it. But
the electorate still regards the thing with fear and loathing. A
recent Rasmussen survey
showed that 54% of likely voters favor repeal, the precise
percentage who opposed the law when it passed. Nonetheless, if the
President is re-elected, ObamaCare will become a permanent feature
of the entitlement landscape. The Supreme Court has demonstrated
that it won’t protect us from the beast’s depredations, and a high
priority of a second Obama term will be full implementation of his
most important domestic “achievement.”
The only way to kill this monster is full repeal. And, for all
intents and purposes, tomorrow offers the last chance to set that
process in motion. The need to take advantage of this opportunity
is made manifest by a review of what the President and the Democrat
Congress wrought in the name of “reform.” It isn’t possible to
cover all of Obamacare’s flaws in one column, but the point can be
made by a brief summary of its worst provisions. Among these are
mandates that restrict individual liberty and freedom of
conscience, tax increases totaling more than $800 billion, the
creation of perverse economic incentives that will kill millions of
jobs, and the creation of a rationing board whose power will be
virtually unchecked.
Obamacare contains a variety of arbitrary and harmful mandates,
including one that requires insurance companies to provide health
policies that meet federally defined “minimum standards.” This is a
very bad idea with a long
track record of driving insurance premiums up. But the law’s
most egregious mandates are the “minimum coverage provision” that
requires you to buy health coverage regardless of your desire or
need to do so, and the HHS contraception mandate that requires all
employers — including Catholic hospitals and universities — to
provide employees coverage for abortion pills, contraceptives, and
sterilization procedures. Combined, these mandates constitute a
brazen assault on our most basic liberties.
The “minimum coverage provision,” more commonly known as the
individual mandate, forces you to buy a service from a private
company approved by the government. This is the first time in the
history of the republic that such a law has been passed by
Congress. And, contrary to the claims of its supporters, it isn’t
comparable to state laws requiring drivers to buy auto insurance.
Such requirements are imposed as a condition of owning and
operating a large and dangerous machine. You can avoid those
mandates by utilizing public transportation. The individual
insurance mandate, on the other hand, is imposed on you merely
because you exist. Thus, you can only avoid it by dying or paying a
fine to the government.
The HHS contraception mandate is arguably worse than the
insurance mandate. It is an outright attack on the religious
liberty of Catholics and countless other people of faith. As it is
phrased on the website launched by
the Archdiocese of Washington in conjunction with a series of
lawsuits filed against the government over this issue, the
contraception mandate is “an unprecedented attack by the federal
government on one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom
to practice one’s religion without government interference.” And
Obama’s token
accommodation is a cheap charade. It provides a very limited
set of exemptions for a tiny group of religious employers that does
not include Catholic hospitals and universities.
In addition to its attacks on individual and religious liberty,
Obamacare contains a gigantic tax increase. The Heritage Foundation
identifies
18 new taxes in the law, totaling $836.3 billion. Some have already
been implemented, including a tax on drug manufacturers that will
total $34.2 billion. Its largest tax increase will fall on
individuals. Couples earning more than $250,000 (and single filers
making more than $200,000) will pay additional taxes totaling
$317.7 billion over the next 10 years. Beginning in 2014,
individuals who decline to buy health insurance will begin paying
taxes that will total $55 billion. Also lurking in the law is a new
tax that will siphon $29.1 billion from the pockets of medical
device manufacturers.
This medical device tax is a good example of the perverse
incentives that will kill so many jobs. It obviously raises the
cost of doing business for the affected companies, and businesses
respond to such increases in ways that bode ill for employees.
Sometimes employers abandon expansion plans that would create new
jobs. Last July, an Indiana-based medical equipment manufacturer
did just that: “Cook Medical… said it’s nixing plans to open
five new plants in the next five years — claiming the [Obamacare]
tax will cost between $15 million and $30 million a year.” Other
companies respond with layoffs. Boston Scientific, which
manufactures defibrillators and pacemakers, announced last year
that it plans to eliminate 1,200 jobs.
Another job killing feature of Obamacare is the exemption of
companies employing fewer than 50 full time workers from the tax
that larger companies must pay if they fail to provide health
insurance. This provision is behind the huge number of part-time
jobs that were included in the October 6th report from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics (BLS) and it explains why the November 2nd BLS
report shows double-digit percentages of underemployed workers in
many states. For purposes of Obamacare, the IRS defines a part-time
employee as someone working less than 30 hours per week. As Robert
Samuelson succinctly
explains, “Employers have a huge incentive to hold workers
under the 30-hour weekly threshold.”
Incentives to avoid creating full-time jobs, combined with huge
tax increases and mandates that threaten our basic liberties, are
certainly enough to put Obamacare on what the President would no
doubt call a “kill list.” But no catalogue of this law’s many
outrages would be complete without a word or two about the
Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB is the committee of
unelected officials whose ostensible purpose is to control costs.
In reality, it will supervise the rationing of care to seniors. The
board’s fifteen unelected members will decide what procedures and
services are “appropriate” for Medicare patients and how hospitals,
doctors, and other health care providers will be paid for those
services.
This power to ration care is such an integral part of Obamacare
that the Democrats tried to inoculate IPAB against repeal. David
Hogberg
reports in Investor’s Business Daily, “Congress is
only able to repeal IPAB during a roughly seven-month window in
2017. First, both the House and Senate must in 2017 introduce a
joint resolution for the purpose of repealing IPAB. However, they
have to introduce the resolution no later than Feb. 1, 2017.”This,
according to legal scholars, is unconstitutional because no
Congress possesses the power to impose such limits on future
Congresses. Sadly, we have recent evidence that the Supreme Court
is not always willing to uphold constitutional limits on
congressional power.
IPAB, to borrow a phrase from the immortal P.G. Wodehouse, puts
the tin hat on it. ObamaCare has got to go. The monster must be
slain — now. And the only way that will happen is if Mitt Romney
is sworn in as President in January and the Republicans have
majorities in the Senate and the House. Romney has his flaws, but
he will probably keep his pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare.
If Barack Obama is re-elected, his unnatural and corrupt creation
will have four more years to intertwine its tentacles throughout
the U.S. health care system. By the end of a second Obama term, it
will be virtually impossible to disentangle them. If we want to get
rid of Obamacare, tomorrow is our last chance.
