by Rod D. Martin
October 31, 2013

As almost everyone now knows, President Obama not only knew that millions would lose their existing health insurance because of Obamacare, he actually directed the writing of regulations that were more restrictive than the Affordable Care Act itself:  that is, he made sure as many people would lose their current coverage as he possibly could.

Of all people, NBC’s investigative unit broke this story, with a horrified exposé that prompted mass coverage throughout the mainstream media. “Obama lied!”  Well yes he did.  Deliberately, repeatedly, and utterly intentionally.

For the first time in this twisted mess, which started with Pelosi’s “we have to pass it so you can find out what’s in it” and Democrat Senators ridiculing the thought that they would actually read legislation before voting on it, there is outrage.  And there is fear:  fear on the parts of those losing their coverage with little hope of replacing it with anything they can afford, fear on the parts of millions now being driven into Medicaid, not accidentally the only part of Obamacare that seems to be succeeding.

There is also fear about the new numbers showing that more people are now on welfare than are working full time, as there should be. There’s no question Obama is achieving the exact sort of mass-dependency state the left has always sought, not just here but in every nation that has fallen into its grasp.

So should we fear — as we did when this began — that millions driven into Obamacare will become a bedrock consituency for it, in the way of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?

Perhaps not. The good news about Obamacare is that it gives very little to anyone. For all the virtues we’ve heard extolled by our liberal friends, the fact remains that Obamacare is not a giveaway: it forces you to pay a lot more for something that in most cases you already had; and all too frequently, the new, vastly more expensive coverage actually covers a lot less, unless you include mandatory abortion coverage of course.

Indeed, this is a lot of what’s coming unstuck for the President.  When liberal true-believers went onto his $634 million boondoggle of a website, Healthcare.gov, what they found was not another giveaway, another “Obama phone.”  No, they found something they had to pay for, at a price far above what had been available to them just days before, on a website that took enormous amounts of their personal data with little or no privacy, and then crashed.  David Frum’s take on this was particularly choice.

So no one’s going to be dependent on this except 26 year olds on their parents’ insurance (assuming that hasn’t been cancelled). And guess what: conservatives have no problem with the 26 year olds. Quite the contrary: one of the easiest ways to make this whole exercise unnecessary — and actually fix real problems instead of just creating new ones — is to allow any group who wants to band together to form a risk pool. Why not allow group coverage for The Martin Family? Or for members of the ACLU, or the NRA? Or for the We Want Group Coverage Club, consisting of whosoever will?

Why not? Liberals and their insurance company allies/donors have been blocking that kind of reform since 1943. And yes, people like me have been writing and speaking about this for a long, long, long time.

Once again, voluntary associations could easily collapse the cost and provide complete portability, just like personal heathcare expensing (health savings accounts in its watered-down form) and plenty of other true free market solutions. But Democrats want neither lower cost nor portability: they either want a one-size-fits-all government solution that has the handy side effect of radically increasing government control over everyone and everything; or they want a system designed for labor unions and corporate donors (what we’ve had since FDR).

No one had ears to hear this for the past 20 years, as the media drowned out any conservative ideas on the subject and focused only on the sort of deform Hillary and Obama have championed. But that may well now change, since everybody — including those same media outlets — have discovered their Messiah is just a big fat liar.

He knew. He lied. And there’s no hiding it.