Obamacare Ruins More Than Health Care

By Richard E. Ralston

The suppression of liberty in health care choices will take all privacy down with it. Tight government control of electronic medical records—which used to be private—seems a minor contribution to the destruction of the Fourth Amendment compared to the seizure of everyone's communications with everybody, without individual court orders based on probable cause.

How can we protest loss of privacy in any communications when we must surrender it for our medical records?

In 2014, virtually no new physicians will be available to treat millions of new Medicaid patients, but 10,000 newly hired IRS agents will impose fines on those unwilling to buy mandatory insurance.

Hopefully this will distract the IRS from persecution of nonprofit organizations that oppose the party line coming from Washington, DC.

As the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just reported, businesses will continue to cut jobs and implement reduction in the working hours of millions of employees to avoid the insurance mandate in 2015. Then they will cut insurance policies for employees in favor of paying fines and saving billions of dollars in rising insurance costs.

Who could have imagined they would do such a thing?

We will get more bad news when insurance companies announce far higher premiums for 2015, as young people are not rushing to sign up for more expensive insurance to subsidize their more affluent elders.

Who could have expected that?

President Obama could have expected it, just as he knew that insurance commissioners would generally reject his one-year reprieve from the lie that if you like your insurance, you can keep it.

The president will continue to delay or set aside any provision of the law without authorization of Congress or reference to the provisions of the law. In fact, the replacement of law approved by Congress with arbitrary and vague administrative regulations—approved by countless anonymous bureaucrats—is not just a consequence of Obamacare but an explicit objective of the president.

After the recent deal with Iran that supposedly prevents their development of nuclear weapons, President Obama essentially told the government of Israel that if they like their current security arrangements, they will be able to keep them.

Iran knows what the White House policy is, now: When you lie, make it a big lie and feature it prominently and frequently in all of your statements; if and when you are finally called on it by your friends as well as your opponents, keep repeating it anyway—even when the truth vanishes like a red line in Syria.

When Iran does complete and deploy nuclear weapons, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will undoubtedly explain that the president's previous promise that the United States will never allow Iran to build nuclear weapons was true in 2009, but foreign policies change every year.

Our government will be no more consistent and reliable on national security than on health care. Both can easily go up in smoke.

The wreckage of Obamacare will expand through all of government as it becomes a model for rule by presidential decree.

We must not let the damage to medicine resulting from Obamacare distract us from the fact that it is just the leading edge of increasing government control over every aspect of our lives.

Read more at ACFM.org