Only Obama Believes the Debate Is Over

Like George Bush before him, Barack Obama unfurled a “Mission Accomplished!” banner last week that can only come back to haunt him. To assert, as Obama just did, that the Obamacare debate is settled is to flout hard truths that are negatively impacting the lives of virtually every American each and every day, hitting them literally where they live. Although the overweening arrogance of the man has undoubtedly blinded him to the risks of such hubris, Democrats running for their political lives in November can smell the impending disaster like a dead skunk a mile down the road. Not that Obamacare isn’t a disaster already  – only that the looming catastrophe will make the ‘Affordable’ Care Act snafus to date seem mild in comparison.

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For  starters, although millions of Americans who had individual insurance have lost their coverage, that figure will grow to tens of millions once Obamacare has laid waste not just to health care plans offered by the largest employers, but to the insurers themselves.  More immediately,  however, and despite the almost weekly watering down of Obamacare mandates, an unprecedented spiral in health insurance premiums has begun that can only accelerate between now and the fall elections.  In this regard, there was bad news for Democrats last week when a quarterly survey of 148 health brokers was released by Morgan Stanley. Focusing on policy renewals, it showed the biggest surge in rates for individuals and small groups since the survey began three years ago.  Rate hikes over the three-month period amounted to about 12 percent, but some states are experiencing surges 10 to 50 times that.  They are hitting New Hampshire hardest of all, since all but a handful of health care providers exited the state after its Democratic governor became the first to embrace the Obamacare model wholeheartedly.

In covering the story, the press has shown itself to be almost as stupid as Obama is arrogant. They still view the Obamacare fiasco as a political issue with a political solution. It is not. The mainstream media undoubtedly believe that with a little debate here, a policy tweak there and some more give-and-take on Capitol Hill, the Affordable Care Act can be rejiggered into usability.  That’s like trying to reform the banking system by adding a thousand pages of new regulations.  And just as nothing short of abolishing the Federal Reserve will restore sanity and moderation to the financial system, only scrapping Obamacare in toto and completely privatizing health care will allow the system to regenerate itself. Meanwhile, Obama and the mainstream media are dead wrong to assume that news of seven million people enrolling in Obamacare will squelch the debate. In the first place, and as everyone other than MSNBC viewers knows, that number is a fraud. More important, especially in relation to the upcoming election, is that Obamacare’s staggering costs are being felt each day by every American. The pain cuts across political lines, and that is why the outsize problems associated with Obamacare are more than merely “political.”

Republicans are skittish about running solely on a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It’s my guess that by November, that may be the only promise voters want to hear.