Propping Up Obamacare - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Propping Up Obamacare
by

Speaking to reporters in Germany on Monday, President Obama glibly declared that his transformation of America’s health care system is “working.” He chuckled over the absence of predicted “horrors” from the change. “None” exist, he asserted.

His much-advertised empathy doesn’t extend to the countless Americans who have seen their health care costs increase as their coverage decreases. These aren’t “horrors” in Obama’s mind, just problems Americans deserve to bear for the sake of the collective.

He still speaks as if his law produces only winners and no losers. It clearly doesn’t improve health care “for all.” It may improve it for some, but even that is a dubious claim, given the significant number of Americans who have lost the coverage Obama falsely promised they could keep and found themselves scrambling for lesser coverage many doctors won’t service.

Obama’s definition of success is based not upon measurable improvements in health care but upon the number of new enrollees in health care plans, which is just a measure of government coercion under his law. Forcing people to buy insurance that they don’t want and that serves them poorly is hardly proof of a policy’s success. If Americans don’t see this arrangement as horrific, they at least see it as horrible: 54 percent of Americans still oppose Obamacare, despite the glorious benefits Obama touts for it.

They don’t consider it to be “working.” They see it is as tired and failed redistributionism.

Recognizing the law’s unpopularity and anticipating a soon-to-be-released Supreme Court ruling that could set it back, Obama has redoubled his efforts in its defense. On Tuesday, the most anti-Catholic president in American history appeared before the Catholic Health Association to make the “moral” case for its preservation. The dissident group, headed by a left-wing nun, Sister Carol Keehan, who makes over a million dollars a year to lobby for big government, was happy to oblige Obama in his audacious act of propaganda.

Just a few weeks ago, Obama’s HHS strengthened the mandate that all insurance companies cover contraceptives and abortifacients free of charge—one more reminder that authentically Catholic health insurance is impossible to provide anymore. Yet the “Catholic professionals” at CHA cheered Obama wildly as he approached the stage. Keehan lavished praise on a law built upon a moral philosophy blatantly at odds with Catholic teaching.

“I just love nuns generally,” said Obama when he began his remarks. He spoke wistfully of his first job as a community organizer in Chicago, a job subsidized by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. If it wasn’t for the “moral force” of the Catholic Health Association, he said, Obamacare would never have passed. Keehan beamed with pride as Obama essentially told her that she had hammered into place the most corrupting system the federal government has ever devised.

Obama knew that if he could control people’s health care he could also control their morality. He correctly saw that a health care law would be the most effective means of “fundamentally transforming” the country. He found a way to make everyone complicit in the Planned Parenthood philosophy of life. That the Catholic Health Association would give him a platform to make a “moral” case for this travesty is disgraceful but unsurprising given that its primary interest isn’t Catholicism or health care. It is left-wing politics. It exists not to promote Catholic health care but government-run health care, a lucrative arrangement that explains why Keehan and Lloyd Dean, another “Catholic” hospital CEO Obama praised in his speech, make seven-figure salaries.

Obama is pushing the idea that his law is the only “moral” system to treat the sick so that he can cast any opposition to it as immoral. But one could imagine multiple approaches to health care without substantial regulation by the federal government that at once respects traditional morality and provides the best care to the highest number of people. Obamacare fails both those tests. It is immoral in its identification with libertine morality and its disregard for freedom and subsidiarity.

One of the great moral philosophers behind Obamacare, according to the president in his remarks to the Catholic Health Association, was Teddy Kennedy. Obama said, “And if we keep faith with one another and keep working for each other to create opportunity for everybody who strives for it, then, in the words of Senator Ted Kennedy, ‘the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.’”

Kennedy didn’t even believe in the Hippocratic Oath. He equated good health care with universalized abortion. Teddy Kennedy’s “dream” was more like a nightmare, complete with all the horrors Obama claims he can’t see, from subsidized abortion to rationing panels, culminating in a socialized country run by bureaucrats indifferent to both the body and soul.

George Neumayr
Follow Their Stories:
View More
George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
Sign up to receive our latest updates! Register


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Be a Free Market Loving Patriot. Subscribe Today!