GOP Must Strike While ObamaCare Iron Is Hot

When it comes to health care, Republicans need to strike while the iron is hot, and it is white-hot now – and will probably get worse – because of the Obamacare disaster.

The nation’s health insurance rolls are hemorrhaging with Obamacare-forced cancellations, and new sign-ups are dreadfully slow – and not just because of the disgraceful website glitches. People don’t want what Obama’s offering, er, mandating, and they’re not buying what he’s selling (at gunpoint).

On Sunday morning, the White House quietly issued a statement revealing that only 1.1 million people have signed up for Obamacare on the federal website. An additional 1 million have signed up on states’ websites, but even adding these enrollees, the administration is woefully short of its stated goal of 3.3 million enrollments by Dec. 31 and has less than a third of its targeted 7 million number by March 31. But that’s just the good news.

We don’t even have information – because the government won’t provide it – on how many of the allegedly 1.1 million new federal enrollees are actually assured of coverage. All we know is that these people have selected the plans they want on the website; we don’t know whether they’ve paid for them or whether the insurance companies have accepted them for coverage.

The administration’s obscure Sunday statement provided no information as to the demographics and income levels of those enrollees. The financial feasibility of Obamacare depends on the participation of the “young invincibles” – young, healthy people whom this despotic government will soak for premiums to subsidize the sick and elderly. The administration is shrewdly guarding this data because it knows it can’t afford more bad news, and these skewed sign-up patterns would mean that premiums would likely jump again in 2014.

The administration also conspicuously failed to mention that Obamacare forced cancellation of the plans of about 5 million people, which leaves a net loss of some 3 million insured. Reportedly, close to 2 million others signed up for Medicaid coverage, but that will just further tax that underfunded system and the federal budget and will do nothing to help fund the Obamacare mandated plans.

It bears repeating that these forced cancellations were no accident. Nor were they mere collateral damage the administration couldn’t avoid en route to its socialized medicine utopia. They were deviously planned by the administration because they were necessary for Obamacare’s numbers to work.

Despite Obama’s repeated lies, the cancellations were premeditated in order to compel people to obtain more expensive plans through the federal website – to cover things they aren’t even at risk for – and for the federal government to be able to use the premium windfalls to subsidize other people’s health insurance costs. Obamacare was never about improving access to health care, reducing health care costs or improving the quality of care. It was an elaborate government-imposed Ponzi scheme for wealth redistribution and to establish another behemoth federal infrastructure for the government to control never-before-imagined aspects of our everyday lives.

As 2014 unfolds, expect further bad news from Obamacare as the other shoe drops on employer-provided plans.

In the midst of this White House news dump, Nero fiddles; Obama is enjoying another extended vacation and playing golf to his heart’s delight. Even his once-fawning liberal press acknowledged that he seemed to be without energy and disengaged as he was leaving for vacation.

By all accounts and from all quarters, from former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to former knee-tingler Chris Matthews, Obama had his worst year in 2013 – and that’s saying something. His approval ratings continue to hang at all-time lows. Support for Obamacare has reached a record low. A new CNN poll shows that Obama is even losing his own base over Obamacare. Democratic senators are complaining that Obama’s personality makes it difficult to work with him. Others, along with Democratic congressmen, want to distance themselves from him as the 2014 elections approach.

When I said Republicans should strike while the iron is hot, I meant they need to hammer Obama daily for the damage he’s causing to the American people on Obamacare alone. They need to feed Americans the facts as relentlessly as Obama has campaigned to force-feed us this nightmare.

And they need to immediately pass in the House, with great fanfare, a comprehensive health care reform bill containing the myriad market-based reforms they’ve proposed over the past few years – from tort reform to ending discriminatory tax treatment for employer-provided plans to expanding health savings accounts to reducing government mandates to ending prohibition on consumers crossing state lines to buy insurance to supporting retail health clinics to providing vouchers for the working poor and chronically uninsured.

Passing such a bill would not keep Obama from lying that Republicans have no alternative plan, but it would give them something tangible with which to counter and showcase his lie.

Republicans have much work to do. We are in a war for the survival of the country as we know it, and in order to save it, we need to fight with the same relentless intensity as Obama and his forces are fighting to destroy it.

The Patriot Post® · GOP Must Strike While ObamaCare Iron Is Hot