The Patriot Post® · ObamaCare, Good and Hard

Bill Cosby said that his father used to pass gas in the living room then blame an invisible elephant running under the couch. “And my brother,” said Cosby, “was dumb enough to look for it!”

With Obamacare, Democrats laid a big one. And they’re blaming invisible elephants.

Dutifully, the Left is looking for them.

With Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Tea Party harassment by the IRS, and the multiple eavesdropping scandals, the Obama administration and its allies deployed their usual arsenal of Orwellian language and media gimmicks, a whole army of invisible elephants.

Bush sent those guns into Mexico. Some YouTube hack set the Middle East on fire. Rogue elements of a Cincinnati office lashed out nationwide against the Tea Party. The NSA [redacted].

In the meantime, the Left pushed forward, utilizing the federal bureaucracy to implement their agenda. To cement their legacy, these utopian technocrats passed the Affordable Care Act and radically distorted 16% of the largest economy in the world.

Such epic and disruptive socialization efforts inevitably leave real people hurt. As part of their invisible elephant army, the Left manufactures victims of fake crusades then puts a face to them. (Think Sandra Fluke with the war on women in 2012.) In contrast, Obamacare is creating real faces from real people.

Edie Sunby, Deborah Cavallaro, and Deborah Persico are the Faces of Obamacare.

Edie Sunby can’t keep her doctors in her battle against stage 4 gallbladder cancer. Deborah Cavallaro got booted off her existing plan because it wasn’t compliant with the new regulations, and she now has to pay more for an equivalent plan on a state exchange. Deborah Persico will similarly see a rate increase. Thanks to Democrats, these women have fewer choices for their healthcare.

For the past five years, Americans have put up with invisible elephant stories from both politicians and the media that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. Watching Republicans and Democrats battle like the undead Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbosa in Pirates of the Caribbean as “two immortals locked in an epic battle until Judgment Day” had become an exercise in abstraction. A strange game of he-said-she-said played out in the far away land of Washington, DC.

But Obamacare is a gamechanger.

The game is now he-said-I-said. The Faces of Obamacare aren’t high-ranking administration officials sitting hands-folded at a Congressional hearing. The Faces of Obamacare are as average and broad a cross-section of Americans as you can find. As of now, 3.5 million individual Americans know with certitude that Obama lied. The stink of it is in their nostrils. And it will make them re-evaluate everything else Big Brother has been saying.

Over the next several months, the number of cancellations could rise to 15 million in the individual market. What will happen once the employer mandate kicks in and this turnover moves on to the other 80% of health insurance owners? Forbes reports that according to Obama’s own HHS, potentially “51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range)” will be affected. This amounts to “93 million Americans.”

America is a tolerant, understanding, and compassionate nation, but one thing our citizenry will not tolerate is getting personally screwed over. Obama won the 2012 election by convincing people that Republicans were out to stick it to women, minorities, the poor, etc.. But now, it turns out that Obama is the one who is sticking it to us. Obama has done the worst thing a politician can do. Be the source of someone’s personal fears.

Obamacare was meant to sacrifice freedom for security. It is providing neither, and it is revealing just how far Obama will go to fulfill the central mission of his presidency: an end to the “unfairness” of “inequality.” Too much money at the top, not enough at the bottom. The “rich” aren’t paying their “fair share.” Many Americans who support Obama support this stick-it-to-the-rich approach and didn’t shed a tear when they thought insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors were going to get screwed. Little did they know how rapidly they would become part of the “rich” who would be asked to pay “a little more” so that Obama could execute his redistributionist schemes.

The American writer H.L. Mencken observed that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Over 3.5 million, and rising, are getting cancellation notices on their health insurance. Over 3.5 million people are getting Obamacare good and hard.

Of these millions of people getting cancellation notices, some will still vote for Democrats, and some were already red-blooded Republicans. However, given Obama’s tremendous plunge in the polls, others may be rethinking their votes for the first time in a decade. As Obamacare unfolds, those considering changing their votes are only going to go one way: away from the invisible elephants and toward the real ones in the GOP.

Republicans have a unique opportunity to pick off millions of voters. True-blue Massachusetts voted for Republican Scott Brown to stop Obamacare from happening the first time around. How red will the map turn once 93 million Americans get Obamacare good and hard?

Robert J. Guenther is a political commentator and Editor-in-Chief of BiasBreakdown. He can be followed on Twitter @biasbreakdown.