What’s stunning about the Obamacare rollout isn’t the poor performance of the marketplace website or the dismal enrollment numbers. Anyone who has taken an objective look at the Obama administration’s performance record over the past several years should not have been surprised at what we’ve seen so far.
What is most unsettling is the administration’s heartless disregard for what the failure of Obamacare actually means to people. They’re spinning statistics as hard as they can, but real people are hurting. Millions are receiving written evidence from their insurance companies of the President’s oft-repeated, now broken promise: if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.
President Obama has a choice right now. He can face these people, or he can deal with his own political pressure. As usual, he’s picking politics over people.
While House Republicans have been responding to story after story of real people who are paying the price for Obamacare, President Obama has been busy trying to calm the fears of members of his own party. House and Senate Democrats have staked their entire political legacies on the empty promise of Obamacare, and instead of joining their colleagues in seeking solutions, they are looking for ways to save themselves.
The contrast is stark. While young professionals across America are striving to get the compensation they’re due at work, they’re seeing their hard-earned raises and bonuses eaten away by the uncertainty President Obama hasn’t just created, but continues to perpetuate with his stubborn loyalty to his own legacy. While parents of growing children across the country are sitting up late at night working through tighter family budgets to try to pay for increased healthcare costs, Democrats are huddling together looking for ways they can provide just enough tweaks to an inherently flawed law to get us through to the next “glitch” or “fumble.”
Democrats have repeatedly scoffed at, degraded, and misconstrued Republican attempts to provide immediate relief to single adults and working parents who already have paychecks stretched too thin as partisan and obstructive.
They have led us to this place, and their refusal to acknowledge real, human faces of this problem tells us they have no intention of leading us out.
I’ve only been in Congress for 11 months, but I’ve worked with people my whole life. Before I got into state politics, I was pastor of a rural church that didn’t have a lot of people, but worked hard to serve the community.
That’s where I learned an important lesson. People, not numbers, are what matter. When it comes to leadership, they can tell if you’re serious about helping them meet their own needs, and when your eye is only on the bottom line.
President Obama did a great job in his two campaigns convincing young people that he cared about their everyday lives. If President Obama continues to dismiss the real, human voices that are trying to tell him the truth about his healthcare plan, then he’s done worse than give us a bad policy. He’s misled everyone.
Rep. Doug Collins is a Republican who represents Georgia’s 9th congressional district.
