What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (21 page)

So corrupt was the Democrats’ accounting on ObamaCare that the administration itself was forced to jettison a cherished part of it. In October 2011, Sebelius announced that the administration was bagging the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, a program to provide long-term care and one of Ted Kennedy’s dearest redistributionist dreams. Pronouncing the program fiscally unsustainable, Sebelius acknowledged that Team Obama “[did] not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.” As the Heritage Foundation reported, CLASS advocates in the administration and Congress pushed for its inclusion in ObamaCare despite warnings that it was so flawed and expensive that it would require either a major taxpayer bailout or another insurance mandate to keep it afloat. In the end, even the most creative Health and Human Services accountants couldn’t make the math work and the
New York Times
was forced to admit, “It didn’t add up.” Down the tubes it went, the first but certainly not the last of the unsustainable ObamaCare provisions to bite the dust.

Given the long
actual
“parade of horribles,” Schumer’s prediction of growing public support for ObamaCare has become an absurd joke rather than reality. From the day of its passage, many polls consistently have shown full repeal favored by nearly 60 percent of the American people.

In its first act in January 2011, the new House Republican majority began the process of getting the nation out from under this economy-crushing albatross. They voted on the amusingly and correctly titled “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” It passed resoundingly but failed in the Senate, amid much Democratic anxiety. They knew the majority of Americans hated ObamaCare and wanted it gone. They saw big numbers of their Democratic brethren lose their political careers in large part over it in November 2010. They were running scared.

They also knew there was no real defense of ObamaCare, beyond its true purpose of redistributing wealth and health care. So they reached for another daft defense by claiming that the GOP was “obsessed” with health care when the American people wanted them focused on jobs. Let’s get this straight. While they were busy “obsessing” over their redistributive health care dream, Democrats claimed that it was critical to the economy, would be deficit neutral, and would create jobs. When Republicans advanced repeal, suddenly Democrats claimed that health care had
nothing
to do with the economy and that the GOP was off in the weeds when (a) the
Democrats
had been off in the health care weeds for two years, and (b)
they
had argued it was central to the economy. When the kooks said that, they meant that it was central to their plan to create a command economy. When the Republicans said it was central, they meant that, given its costs and uncertainty, repealing it would help the economic recovery. If ObamaCare were really about improving health care, why then did Team Obama grant so many waivers for unions, businesses, and even entire states to get out of it? Why did they fulfill Bill Clinton’s request for exemptions for Victoria’s Secret models, Hooters girls, professional mud wrestlers, and all the members of the Lingerie Football League?

The practical economic effects of ObamaCare were so job- and business-killing that even Obama had to face the gruesome facts and give some lucky folks get-out-of-ObamaCare-free cards. The law actually does not grant any statutory authority to waive any part of it. Team Obama just made one up. They claim that the Health and Human Services secretary is authorized to issue temporary waivers to companies or insurers, freeing them from rules mandating minimum standards of health coverage. Other waivers, which Team Obama euphemistically calls “adjustments,” let states ask the HHS secretary to free up requirements that insurers spend a certain percentage of premiums on medical care. And a third waiver, available in 2017, will allow states to effect their own health reforms, but only if they are consistent with Obama-Care’s regulations and objectives. Within moments of the bill’s passage, unions and companies began lining up to take advantage of the waiver “outs.” When McDonald’s, an American icon that offered full “minimed” health insurance to its 30,000 employees, said it may have to drop all coverage, Team Obama sensed a potential political disaster. It then began dispensing waivers like Pez candy.

Because there was no statutory authority to issue waivers in the first place, there were no corresponding criteria with which to decide who got waivers and who did not. It was a subjective White House determination based on politics, money, and cronyism. McDonald’s, which was the subject of a front-page
Wall Street Journal
story detailing its distress over the new law, got a waiver. White Castle, a similarly iconic business, did not. Perhaps White Castle’s big sin was going public
itself
with its ObamaCare problems, rather than having an outside journalist do it. The company said that a single provision in the law would eat up roughly 55 percent of its yearly income after it goes fully into effect in 2014, making it difficult to maintain its 421 restaurants and hire new workers, never mind keep up the health coverage they already provided. White Castle was no rogue health insurance evader. It had been providing health coverage to its employees since 1924 and had been paying between 70 and 90 percent of health care costs for those employees. But with ObamaCare punishing its good behavior, White Castle said it was considering dropping its employee-based coverage and dumping those employees in government-run exchanges. To the kooks, this means a job well done. Hence, no waiver for White Castle. But REI, a Seattle-based company whose CEO was an Obama campaign donor and loud advocate for ObamaCare, obtained a waiver for its 2,000 employees. Perhaps White Castle’s biggest mistake was not using actor Kal Penn as its personal negotiator. Penn, a.k.a. Kumar from
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
, was already working in the Obama administration’s executive branch as something called the associate director in the White House Office of Public Engagement … whatever the hell that is.

Unions, however, were the prime beneficiaries of ObamaCare’s crony socialism. As a major source of financial and political support for the Democrats generally and Obama in particular, unions of all stripes formed a conga line to request ObamaCare waivers. Most of them had enthusiastically contributed self-serving ideas as the policy was being drafted, and all cheered when it passed. And yet, when it came time to implement it, many unions—from the SEIU and the Teamsters to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Communications Workers of America—sought, and got, shelter in the protective arms of the waiver.

In fact, half of all the approximately 1,800 ObamaCare waivers granted by the administration were doled out to unions, and in six months alone, from June 2011 to January 2012, labor unions representing over half a million workers were exempted from the health care fiasco. Without the exemptions, these unions would have been forced to drop low-cost coverage for seasonal, part-time, and low-wage workers due to skyrocketing premiums. The only way they were able to keep their health care is by pleading with the White House to spare them from ObamaCare. So they made the quintessential crony deals: you rub my back, I’ll rub yours. ObamaCare was for suckers, and the unions would certainly not be played for suckers.

Also not game for the ObamaCare sucker punch: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, two of ObamaCare’s biggest political enforcers. In April 2011 alone, Pelosi’s San Francisco district received thirty-eight waivers, including for high-end hotels and restaurants that could presumably afford to provide their employees with ObamaCare’s minimum insurance coverage. But when they started complaining about the law’s onerous costs and rules, Pelosi saw to it that they got waived out, later proclaiming them “emancipated.” And after winning reelection in November 2010, Reid made sure that his
entire state
got a waiver from certain requirements of the new law because—get this—forcing them through, the department [of Health and Human Services] found, “may lead to the destabilization of the individual market.” Duh!

Nevada joined Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, and New Jersey in getting statewide waivers; other states lined up with waiver requests as well, but unless your state was critical to Obama’s 2012 reelection, you could forget it. If you were a Catholic, you could also forget it. In February 2012, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a mandate requiring religious institutions, such as Catholic hospitals, schools, and clinics—which serve people of all faiths—to provide insurance covering contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs, all of which violate the Church’s deeply held beliefs on these matters. Many people of all faiths criticized the move, calling it a direct assault on religious freedom and yet another example of the statist coercion of ObamaCare, but Team Obama was unmoved. The kooks made sure that they and their cronies slipped the leash of ObamaCare. They know full well how destructive it is to business and the overall economy. But they also believe that the horrendous consequences should be suffered by you, not by them. After all, they’re on a higher mission to transform the country.

In 2010, the American people were crossing the street, minding our own business, when the kooks came speeding down the road in a souped-up jalopy. They turned the corner on two wheels and plowed right into us. After they mowed us down, they fled the scene of the accident in an egregious hit-and-run. What the @$%&! just happened?

A twenty-five-hundred-page Rube Goldberg of government power, control, and spending. Redistributing America’s top-flight health care system had to require degrading it, making it look like other failed nationalized health care services, and, through higher taxes, fees, and regulations, moving vast amounts of money from the haves to the have-nots.

Most Americans understand that in addition to being a grotesque assault on our individual freedom of choice, an unaffordable expansion of government, and a redistributive pig-out, ObamaCare is something even darker. The Founders intentionally built a small, nonintrusive federal government to guarantee individual liberty. Central to that concept is the right to private property, which the Founders protected against illegal search, seizure, and confiscation by an all-powerful state. The operative word for the Founders was “private.” They ensured that every American had the right to property that couldn’t be touched by government, forced into a government-run collective, or deemed by some future federal government as “excessive.” When the Founders guaranteed private property, they meant
private
in every sense of the word.

There is nothing more private than your body and your health. And the first thing the leftists set out to do in early 2009 was to seize them in an Orwellian grab of your body and health and, most important, your money. All of those once private pieces of your property are now controlled by the government and are very public indeed. And that, all along, was the true ObamaCare endgame.

When I was sixteen, I took my first paying job in the real world. I was excited about entering the wonderful world of work (as I said, I was sixteen) and earning some meaningful money for the first time. I had big plans for that dough: most of it would be set aside for college and expenses, but I also had dreams of buying my first car. I pictured myself in it, driving with the top down à la Christie Brinkley in National Lampoon’s
Vacation
. I couldn’t afford that red Ferrari, but I’d still be fierce in my new-to-me car. The world (or at least New Jersey) would never be the same.

I blissfully worked for the first two weeks, awaiting the arrival of that first paycheck and what it represented, the beginnings of the American Dream. It arrived in a manila envelope, my name peeking through the cellophane window. I ripped it open, visions of the hot little sports car dancing in my head.

Dude! Where’s my money? When I saw that government at all levels had taken nearly 50 percent of it and there was nothing I could do about it (lest the long arm of the IRS escort me to prison), I literally almost keeled over. Forget the Ferrari. Forget even the Dodge I was considering. The most I could hope for was a Flintstone rockmobile (which ironically, years later, Obama would force Detroit to build). I wouldn’t be driving a Cadillac SRX. Instead, I’d be popping wheelies on a Schwinn BMX.

That’s the soul-crushing and economy-destroying effect of high taxes. And yet, the Democrats are committed in a Norman Bates–with-his-mother kind of way to ever-higher taxes. Old-school liberals used to be known as “tax and spend” lefties. They’d tax like crazy and then spend whatever money the taxes brought in. Today’s kooks are spending
first
—and at such unprecedented levels—that they need ever-higher taxes to pay for it. Their love affair with higher taxes is pure
Rain Man
: “Tax hikes! Definitely tax hikes!”

In mid-July 2011, Obama said two things that sum up his real objective in seeking ever-increasing taxes. In a press conference in which he expressed his frustration over the debt talks, he told the nation that he “would rather be talking about stuff that
everybody welcomes, like new programs
…” He also said, “I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing. In fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that
I don’t need
.” (Emphasis added.)

There it is: the essence of the kooks’ redistributionist agenda. Obama laid out the assumption that since
everybody
welcomes new government programs, you’ve got to smack the highest earners in the wallet to pay for them because, after all, they’re parasites just lounging around “counting their money,” which is also apparently just lying around, getting moldy. Of course, the Big Kookuna Obama will be the judge of how much money you need or don’t need. After all, he told us that he’s got a couple of hundred grand sitting around that
he
doesn’t need, so you must not need much of your dough either. After all, “collective salvation” doesn’t come cheap.