NRO’s Mark Steyn minces no words when it comes to his distaste for Obamacare: “a hierarchy of privileges,” he calls it, along with “crappy” and “inefficient.”
First, Steyn points out that it’s doubtful anyone has read the “comprehensive” health care act: it’s a thousand pages long. As he says, the problem with something so “comprehensive” is that “when everything’s in it, nothing’s in it.” But worst of all, it means whatever the government wants it to mean:
The Affordable Care Act means whatever President Obama says it means on any particular day of the week. Whether it applies to you this year, next year, or not at all depends on the whim of the sovereign, and whether your CEO golfs with him on Martha’s Vineyard. A few weeks back, the president unilaterally suspended the law’s employer mandate. Under the U.S. Constitution, he doesn’t have the power to do this, but judging from the American people’s massive shrug of indifference he might as well unilaterally suspend the Constitution, too. Obamacare is not a law, in the sense that all persons are equal before it, but a hierarchy of privilege; for example, senators value their emir-sized entourages and don’t want them to quit, so it is necessary to provide the flunkies who negotiated and drafted the Affordable Care Act an exemption from the legislation they imposed on the citizenry. Once again, the opt-out is not legal.
Another issue Steyn has with Obamacare is that now, everyone and their mother is involved in your health care:
For most of modern history, your health care was a matter between you and your doctor. Since World War II, in much of the developed world, it’s been between you, your doctor, and your government. In America, it’s now between you, your doctor, your government, your insurer, your employer, your insurer’s outsourced health-care-administration-services company . . . Anybody else? Oh, let’s not forget Lois Lerner’s IRS, which, in the biggest expansion of the agency in the post-war era, has hired 16,500 new agents to determine whether your hernia merits an audit.
Steyn is also concerned with the economic effects of Obamacare, which he deems “destabilizing.” He believes about 40 percent of Americans are going to get caught in the part-time/not-quite-full-time trap that keeps employers from having to insure them. The “elites”, he says, believe that Obamacare makes perfect sense – for everyone but them.
The U.S. economy can never recover until more of its real “human resources” are engaged in genuine wealth creation. Yet Obamacare instead incentivizes the diversion of more and more manpower into the Republic of Paperwork.
It remains to be seen if Obamacare will take off, as it continues to draw fire from employers, unions, politicians and plain old Americans that just don’t trust a thousand pages of everything and nothing.
