TOP 10 LESSONS OF OBAMACARE

Robert Tranciski, writing at Real Clear Politics, offers his take on the top 10 lessons of Obamacare. It's worth reading in its entirety, but the Cliff Notes version is as follows:

1. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

You've heard all of the stories, which can be summarized by the real quote: "I was all for ObamaCare until I found out I was paying for it." Or other other real quote: "Of course, I want people to have health care. I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."

The entire middle-class welfare state, to which ObamaCare is the latest addition, is an attempt to make the middle class into a constituency for big government by promising them endless benefits, from free health care to a guaranteed income, with no costs, consequences, or trade-offs, and no strings attached. Everything is supposed to be paid for by "the rich," which means anyone who makes a dollar more than you.

Of course, it turns out that it's not "the rich" paying for everyone else. It's the productive being sucked dry by the leeches.

2. Regulation stifles production.

Speaking of productivity: when you pass 25,000 pages of regulations, you get people who are good at following regulations, not at producing goods or services of value. It turns out that all of the myriad regulations may not, in fact, be wholly compatible with reality. But reality is of no concern to the government.

3. The power to tax is the power to destroy.

Government's only power It is the power to tax, to confiscate, to ban, to jail, to kill -- but not to produce anything of value.

There are already indications that ObamaCare will lead to a shortage of doctors because it's paying them less to do more work... the essence of ObamaCare is summed up in the fact that millions of people are now being booted off of their existing health insurance plans--but the state and federal exchanges that are supposed to offer them new insurance aren't even functioning.

As for who destroyed our health care system?

4. No one is accountable.

Who's been fired for the ongoing Obamacare clusterbungle? Not Kathleen Sebelius. Not anyone so far as we can tell.

The gap between Obama's campaign technology and the implementation of ObamaCare is explained entirely by this difference between campaigning and governing. For politicians, manipulating you into voting for them is always going to be more important than actually delivering on the promises they made when they were campaigning.

In fact, you can rest assured that the paper-pushing bureaucrats behind this debacle don't have to worry about their jobs, their pensions, their health care, or anything else that the rest of us lose sleep over.

5. Politicians lie.

Yes, all politicians lie, but not as quite as brazenly as Obama and his administration in the run-up to the Obamacare cramdown.

An in-depth report in the Washington Post about the chaotic planning for the launch of ObamaCare indicates that the project was repeatedly undermined by attempts to hide the truth for political reasons.

Democrats have tried to pin the problems on Republicans for "sabotaging" Obamacare, but that's patently false. If the government can't succeed in implementing a program when there's political opposition, then it shouldn't bother doing anything since there will always be political opposition. At least, as long as we still live in a free country.

6. The press lies, too.

The press played a particularly disgusting role in helping grease the skids for Obamacare's completely partisan passage. It uses supposedly non-partisan fact-checkers to claim there weren't death panels (there are, and Paul Krugman admitted as much), it crowed about all of the great benefits of Healthcare.gov right up until the site melted down, and it routinely dismissed any criticism of the White House's obvious lies leading up to the disastrous rollout.

Of course, since many of these paper-pushers move freely between employment as Democrat staffers and journalists, this should come as no surprise.

7. The Law of Unintended Consequences.

Pelosi was right: we really did have to pass it to find out what was in it, and what we discovered was like a multi-layered crap sandwich. It's projected to wipe out 129 million insurance policies that 95 percent of insureds were perfectly happy with, it's levying a horrific marriage tax (five figures, in many cases), and it's reported to be destroying swaths of the medical device business.

Obama's small cadre of central planners simply cannot replace billions of individual, minute decisions that individuals and companies make when their own interests are at stake. Mark Levin warned of this in Ameritopia, who calls his brand of hubris "Utopian Statism."

8. The Law of Intended Consequences.

By this, Tranciski means there are parts of Obamacare that are intended to destroy. Harry Reid and other Democrats have let slip that Obamacare is but the first step on the road to single-payer; that is, the government controlling every aspect of the health care system.

If you thought Chapter 1 of Obamacare was bad, stay tuned until it resembles Cuba's system.

9. "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

So said Ronald Reagan, describing the nine most terrifying words in the English language.

Charles Krauthammer recently described his personal journey from the political left to the political right, and one of the key steps was when the data came in about the consequences of the Great Society welfare state. It turned out that the War on Poverty did not, in fact, lift people out of poverty but instead trapped them in a cycle of dependence on government. The great symbols of this failed welfare state were the high-rise public housing projects, which turned out to be government-run ghettos more violent and hopeless than the ones they had replaced.

Obamacare threatens to turn into another such failure. It will "help" Americans by booting 130 million off their existing insurance, laundering trillions through the federal government for their trouble, all to give 10 million "uninsureds" more choices.

Rest assured that it will be just as successful as the "Great Society", if we're lucky.

10. Freedom is indivisible.

To the left, all of the lies about Obamacare don't matter, because they know better than us how we should live our lives. We don't know enough to pick our own insurance plans, our own light bulbs, our own shower heads, or our own anything. Except, somehow, we're smart enough to elect politicians to serve as our ruling elite.

On a practical level, government regulation of economics is itself an encroachment on our liberty and gives the government leverage to impose further encroachments. On an ideological level, if we can't be trusted to choose an insurance plan, why would the big-government elites trust us to choose a political leader or a political platform? In excusing the president for telling a Big Lie to the American people, the defenders of ObamaCare are declaring their hostility to freedom across the board.

As I said, this is only the short version of Tracinski's excellent article. Read the whole thing, then pass it on.


Hat tip: BadBlue News. Related: The 10 Commandments of Government.