Let’s get this out of the way right now—there is no Obamacare fix.
Repeat after me—there is no Obamacare fix.
Obamacare is not an epic failure simply because of its incompetent implementation best symbolized by a $94 million website that doesn’t work. Rather, Obamacare’s incompetent implementation is a symptom of its real disease.
That real disease is this: Obamacare cannot possibly work because it operates outside the natural laws of economics, and it’s another ham-fisted attempt by government to do something that is outside of its God-given (or Constitutional) jurisdiction.
In other words, Obamacare is magical thinking. It’s tilting at windmills, or the legislative equivalent of howling at the moon. It’s an attempt to ignore reality, which is to say its sheer lunacy. And you can’t fix crazy anymore than you can fix stupid. This was never going to work. It was always going to start and end like this, and therefore any earnest or well-intentioned attempts to put lipstick on this turd will just make the foul stench surrounding it all the worse.
For example, right now there are some bi-partisan efforts being mounted in Congress to restore the health insurance millions of Americans have already lost because of Obamacare. However, I don’t understand how that can possibly be done without further government meddling in the market place, which is what cost these people their health plan in the first place. The market place simply responded to the reality of what Obamacare’s various and punitive mandates, penalties, and fees was going to do to the healthcare industry, and was forced therefore by government to respond to the new reality. Unlike government, the market place is not able to just simply print more money or confiscate people’s prosperity when it runs out of resources.
Thus, any attempts to “fix” Obamacare will likely be a perpetuation of the same failed government-interventionist scheme that got us here in the first place. What are we going to do, counter-mandate that now businesses have to provide coverage they can’t afford? So now we’re not just going to cost millions of people their healthcare, but now we’re essentially going to drive job creators out of business while we’re at it? That’s akin to burning the village to save it.
We don’t need “good” government here. We need less government. And less government is good government.
There may be some short term “less government” relief possible like more flexible and generous terms for personal health savings accounts, tax credits to encourage businesses not to drop coverage for their employees, etc. Yet even those are market place meddling to some extent and should not be considered long-term solutions. As Senator Rand Paul put it on my radio program recently, those aren’t fixes but simply making Obamacare “less bad.”
Obamacare can’t be fixed but it does have one cure—repeal.
A group of liberty loving patriots tried to effectively repeal Obamacare by defunding it, but they were betrayed and undermined by the leadership of their own party. So now that we’ve established there isn’t any real good to be done in attempting to “fix” Obamacare and the die is cast, it’s time to make those who decided they’d rather shut the government down then address the concerns of the American people own their decision. Nowhere does it say Republicans are responsible for providing the spoonful of sugar that helps the Democrats’ bad medicine go down. They demanded this millstone be tied around their necks, so get out of the way and let the American people hold them accountable for it. Let the American people “make D.C. listen.”
In the meantime, instead of wasting time trying to fix something that cannot be fixed, put your best and brightest minds on coming up with a Constitutional and practical plan for what you’re going to replace Obamacare with (i.e. emphasis on preventative care, making health insurance portable, incentivize healthcare sharing programs, etc.) once the American people have sufficiently punished those responsible for this disaster in next year’s elections.
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