Eighteen percent of the American economy has been rewritten into a snarling train wreck tens of thousands of pages long, and crammed down the throats of Americans. All Americans except for policymakers who exempted themselves from the law and those corporate giants Obama personally signed waivers for, but let’s not speak of that.
Instead, let us discuss the closure of the National Zoo (How will Americans get through a day without the panda cam?) and how the GOP wants nothing more than to see uninsured Americans perishing in droves from a lack of health care. Priorities, people.
As the government shutdown dust is beginning to settle, what are the actual facts of health care today? A monstrosity of a bill was passed through both houses of our then-Democrat-run and notoriously incompetent Congress.
Essentially, those voting on Obamacare had little knowledge of what was between its hulking bindings, other than that it contained socialized medicine. This new law of the land has some very serious problems.
The potential for fraud within the new health care system is perhaps even bigger than the law itself. How much a person pays for his or her level of health insurance is relative to his or her income. And yet, the Obamacare system doesn’t conduct background checks to validate what applicants for health care claim as their yearly income. Does anyone besides Ted Cruz see how that could possibly go wrong?
This lack of verification for financial claims doesn’t end simply at income quoted, but continues on, leading to subsidies fraud, as well as outrageously and unjustly high deductibles for some.
These are only a few of the reasons Obama granted some large corporations a year delay before they are mandated to join the middle class in the disaster euphemistically called Obamacare. This raises the question: Why isn’t a provision made that would allow all Americans to wait and see how the Obamacare boat floats before jumping aboard?
House Republicans sent a bill to the Senate proposing this delay for the American people. It would also have forced Congress and congressional workers to pay the full Obamacare cost without the deal-sweetening subsidies they have been given. Democrats 54-46 voted down the bill, knowing the government would shut down if the bill didn’t pass. But don’t lose sight of how unreasonable those Republicans are being, right?
Republicans are fighting Obamacare through government shutdown to the death. Their death. The law as it stands is a maze of conflict and overregulation doomed to fail on its own, if they could have just let it.
A strategic approach would have been to let the American people have what they wanted when they re-elected Obama in November. Obamacare, complete with its 17 amendments made after its ratification as a law (Obama is such a clever minx, isn’t he?), would have been plastered all over the news. Headlines about the masses of people who can’t sign up because of glitches in the system, and doctors quitting out of frustration with the sheer impossibility of their new workload would have been a reality across the country. See the same Cleveland Clinic praised by Obama in the first 2012 presidential debate as “(providing) great care cheaper than average,” being forced to shave $300 million off its budget to account for Obamacare costs.
The GOP insisted on standing up and fighting, instead of standing back and letting its point prove itself. Instead of watching the wheels fall off the Obamacare wagon as it rumbles on down to destruction, we’ll first witness the GOP go down in flames.
Whitney Greer is a sophomore English major from Medford, Ore.
