According to liberals, it was “un-American” to protest the adoption of Obamacare. Now apparently it’s unpatriotic to not go out of one’s way to help make it a wild success.
The New York Times recently claimed that GOP Congressmen and Governors are spitefully refusing to fund or participate in Obamacare implementation solely to make the President look bad. On Monday, they argued that conservatives are harping on the Internal Revenue Service scandal just so they can delegitimize the IRS — and block its assigned role of determining citizens’ income eligibility for insurance subsidies or who must pay a fine for not purchasing health insurance.
In the Times’ fantasy world, Republicans are going after former IRS tax-exempt division head Sarah Hall Ingram just so they can stall her installation as head of the IRS’s health care office. The Times also claims conservatives are spotlighting Department of Health and Human Services Head Kathleen Sebelius’s improper Obamacare lobbying efforts so the law will fail.
Meanwhile, The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn complained that fast food restaurant owners, nursing home operators and other low-wage employers are trying to “weasel out” of complying with Obamacare — as though it were every businessman’s patriotic duty to mindlessly accept intrusive, expensive regulations. Or as though thousands of Democrat-connected organizations hadn’t already been granted waivers to evade the plan’s dictates.
Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, admitted that Obamacare may be unsustainable, because it forces young, healthy people to pay disproportionately large premiums to subsidize sick, older people — an arrangement that the former won’t stand for and the latter can’t support.
His solution? A massive public relations blitz that reminds the Millennial generation just how much they love Obama and that urges them to buy Obamacare health plans even if it makes no economic sense.
In a hilariously naïve editorial, Emanuel preached, “Young people believe in President Obama. He won by a 23 percent margin among voters 18-29 — just the people who need to enroll. He needs to get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy. Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance.”
Every commencement address should also explain to young graduates where they’re going to find a job in the Obama economy so they can purchase said insurance.
If I understand Emanuel’s appeal correctly, twenty-somethings should subsidize Obama’s legacy, and in return they won’t look like fools for having voted for him if his plan miraculously succeeds.
Good luck with that. Most young people who voted for Obama and supported Obamacare are learning that the penalty for not having health insurance is lower than the actual cost of health insurance, and are acting according to their rational self-interest by declining to purchase it. We should expect young adults — who earn the least of all adult age groups — to do no less.
More broadly, we shouldn’t be surprised when other age groups, and small business owners, and large business owners, and private citizens, and unions, and — yes — Congressmen and their staffers to try to find a way to get out of a plan they know costs more than it’s worth and unacceptably limits their options.
As Obamacare implementation stumbles on, more and more stakeholders are realizing that not only is it not their duty to make the plan succeed, it is in their strong interest to help it fail.
