Tag: ObamaCare

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Accountability

Words Without Meaning

“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” President Barack Obama told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News during last Sunday’s Super Bowl interview.

When studies show one in 20 food stamp transactions to be fraudulent; when the GAO finds $120 million a year spent paying federal workers who are deceased; when, well, “name your own favorite absurdly wasteful program here,” how does the word “accountable” pass through the president’s lips without a respondent clap of thunder followed by the sizzle and pop of a lightning bolt?

Yet, Obama claims — no, promises! — that this omnipresent accountability reaches absolutely “everybody” in the federal government.

President O was responding specifically to O’Reilly’s charge that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the official responsible for the disastrous Obamacare rollout, has faced no consequences.

She’s not alone. Only by replacing the word “everybody” with the phrase “virtually no one” would Mr. Obama’s statement be made accurate.

Yesterday, I detailed several different ways the IRS has violated people’s most important and basic political rights — from blocking citizens trying to form non-​profit groups for communicating their ideas to trashing privacy rights by handing personal tax information to one’s political opponents to harassing donors to “the other” candidate with multiple unwarranted audits. No one in any of these scandals has been disciplined, let go or in any meaningful way held accountable.

“Political language is designed,” as George Orwell warned, “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Up and down the line.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets ideological culture

The Visible Hand Drops the Ball

One of the great things about the Obamacare fiasco is that we get to revisit many of the left’s talking points for the last half-​century and more — and hand the points right back, underlined.

How many times have we heard about market failure? A relentless litany.

Today’s topic? Government failure.

How many times have we been told that markets aren’t as important as we think, since what really matters is managerial know-​how? The “visible hand” and all that. It was a book, if not a movie. And its basic message was that a few college-​grad experts — highly trained technocrats, all — mattered more than competition. Government experts have the information. They have the skills. The techniques are known. Don’t give us any of that “free market” mumbo-​jumbo, they say.

And yet, while the federal government’s efforts to build a usable healthcare​.gov website proved feckless, lame and wildly expensive, Obamacare’s increasingly unbelievable proponents kept the patter going. Some states were doing just fine, they offered. Maryland, for instance.

Well, no.

The Old Line State has had just as much trouble in its new line of pushing online medical insurance policies as other governments. Biggest problem? You mean, other than not being able to put up a usable website on schedule? Or getting only four people signed up on launch day?

The Washington Post informs us that state officials ignored warnings that “no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan” for its scheduled launch.

The evidence is in. Want a new market “exchange”? Don’t turn to government.

Rely, instead, on folks competing in the real market.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Camp, Kitsch, Goofy Pitch

The pitches aired in service of Obamacare have descended from the twee and lightly vulgar to worse than disastrously kitschy and outrageously camp.

The latest example is not the pajama boy icon for Obamacare, a young man wearing a onesie and demonstrating all the manliness of Peter Pan. Of that, Nick Gillespie agrees, it’s egregious: “For many — arguably most — Americans, this guy is hipster douchitude on a cracker.” But, Gillespie reminds me, I’m not the campaign’s audience. Young single women are.

Hmmm?

No, the nadir of fawning, in-​groupy appeal went much further in a video advertisement concocted, we are told, for the LGBT community. You have to see it to believe it — or better yet, just take my word for it. The first minute is jaw-​droppingly silly; the second goes beyond tasteless.

Its propaganda value? Dubious. I would not be surprised to discover that this was made as a parody, for comic purposes alone.

But I think I know enough about camp — the theory of which I’ll leave to Camille Paglia — to not be surprised that someone, somewhere, might actually think it a good way to reach the LGBT community.

Folks often complain about advertising. Well, the pandering, lip-​smacking vulgarity of “capitalist realism” has now come to the welfare state — even if at the hands of folks not directly connected to government. But to those in the know, let me confess: what gets my goat the most is its frank promotion of “assistance to help you pay.”

With the singer making the most vulgar gesture of all, a show-​me-​the-​money shot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

For the People?

Politicians always talk about how hard they work for us.

Of course, not even the most recent tumblers off the proverbial turnip truck believe them. Politicians don’t work so hard, first of all, and certainly not with the idea of putting what “We, the People” want ahead of what “They, the Politicians” want.

This is true across party lines. Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is under fire and two high-​level appointees have resigned over allegations that they closed two highway access lanes from Fort Lee, New Jersey, over the George Washington Bridge into New York City, causing a massive traffic jam just to punish the town’s mayor for not endorsing Christie in the election.

Working hard for the people or turning the screws of government for one’s own benefit?

Meanwhile, a new report by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency, finds that the Obama White House “systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election.”

ACUS also determined that delays in issuing regulations “under Obama went well beyond those of his predecessors” and were caused by “concerns about the agencies issuing costly or controversial rules prior to the November 2012 election.”

Notice that the Obama Administration wasn’t willing to permanently shelve any rules as too burdensome. The only concern? Delaying the pain they intended to inflict on folks until after the election, when voters would have less effective means for expressing their disapproval.

Hardly working for the people; working hard for themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
local leaders national politics & policies too much government

Best Obamacare Prescription

Is non-​compliance the answer?

I recently discussed how sheriffs in Colorado and elsewhere are refusing to cooperate with oppressive new laws, in their case farcical gun-​control laws. Can we find similar inspiration in other fields?

Yes. Consider the medical industry.

Despite the Supreme Court decision okaying some of Obamacare’s key unconstitutional assaults on commerce, judicial battles over the new law are still being fought. More to our point, many doctors scheduled to be manacled by Obamacare have been refusing to slap on the cuffs.

A survey by the New York State Medical Society finds that 44 percent of respondents won’t work with Obamacare clients; another third are unsure what they’ll do. The doctors perceive the chaos and uncertainty of the new regulations and expect low fees.

Dr. Sam Unterricht, president of the Society, says, “This is so poorly designed that a lot of doctors are afraid to participate.” Others are participating only because obliged by organizations that employ them. Perhaps those doctors loath to becoming cogs in the galumphing Obamacare bureaucracy will find ways to extricate themselves from their organizations. Maybe they will emulate the respondent who says that from now on he will accept only cash for his services.

Another survey respondent says: “The solution is simple: Just say no.”

Are these non-​cooperating docs motivated by fear of Obamacare’s destructive impact? Or are they moved mainly by uneasiness about the color of ink at their bottom line? Or, just possibly, are they expressing principled concern for their rights and freedom?

All of these, I hope.

Whatever the case, though, they’re following the right prescription.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Ending Obamacare

Getting rid of Obamacare has proved not so easy.

The GOP House majority, won in late 2010, voted dozens of times to get rid of the program, but without Senate support to pile on (much less override a presidential veto), they could vote to repeal every day of the year and still nothing would happen.

Besides, the Supreme Court has ruled that it’s okey-​constitutionally-​dokey to compel custumers to buy insurance or pay a fine — or a tax that’s not a tax.

And then there was the 2012 presidential election, in which the Romneycare candidate lost to the Obamacare candidate.

But laws imposed by men are not laws of nature. Gravity cannot be annulled; Obamacare sure can.

The New York Times reports that the thinking of “conservative and libertarian theorists” at the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and elsewhere has informed several lawsuits challenging the Obama Administration’s attempts to unilaterally redraft provisions of the law as passed.

A key point is that the IRS has no authority under Obamacare to award tax breaks or subsidies to persons who buy insurance through the federal exchange rather than a state exchange. Ability to impose penalties in turn depends upon the availability of such subsidies. All this matters because many states have fought Obamacare by refusing to set up state exchanges. Some of these states are among the plaintiffs in the lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Congress is holding hearings on how the Obama Administration has repeatedly amended the Affordable [sic] Care Act despite lacking legislative authority to do so.

Our freedom, wealth and health are too important to surrender to government dictocrats. Thankfully, many advocates of medical freedom remain in the trenches.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.