I spoke yesterday to the Memphis Economics Club about America’s looming fiscal crisis, and I did my usual song-and-dance routine about potential Greek-style chaos in the absence of genuine entitlement reform.
But I confess I was stumped when, after the speech, someone from the audience asked me what was going on with Obamacare.
I can pontificate at length about why government intervention has screwed up our healthcare system, and I can wax poetic about the need to restore market forces both with tax reform and with significant changes to Medicare and Medicaid.
But I was asked to speculate about the Obama Administration’s strategy, and I didn’t know what to say other than they’re in panic mode and they’re arbitrarily changing or ignoring the law based on short-term political imperatives.
To get an idea what I’m talking about, here’s what the Wall Street Journal opined.
Liberals say they believe in a living Constitution, and apparently they think the Affordable Care Act is a living document too. Amid one more last-minute regulatory delay, number 38 at last count, the mandate forcing nuns to sponsor birth control is more or less the only part of ObamaCare that is still intact. On Tuesday evening, the Health and Human Services Department announced that the six-month open enrollment period for ObamaCare insurance that began in October 2013 and was supposed to end on the last day of March would be extended indefinitely. …The expanded enrollment period was slipped into a legal crevice related to “exceptional circumstances” signing up such as natural disasters including “an earthquake, massive flooding, or hurricane.” …By the way, as part of this delay HHS will make no attempt to verify real enrollment problems and will instead rely on what the agency calls “the honor system.” No one will be asked why they need an extension. …This pattern of dishonesty and political improvisation has come to define ObamaCare, which is the law for some people, sometimes, except when it isn’t. Nothing HHS claims can be trusted, and little that the President of the United States promised about his signature law has turned out to be true.
Well, I must confess that I (sort of) agree with part of what the White House is doing. Obamacare has been a natural disaster.
Building on this theme, Abby McCloskey and Tom Miller have a column in the WSJ with a blunt message about the mandate.
The individual mandate has failed. After a last-ditch effort with President Obama himself encouraging “young invincibles” to sign up before the deadline, …the White House announced that people who applied for coverage on the federal health-insurance exchange will have until mid-April to finish the paperwork. …The individual mandate had the least effect on those it was supposed to encourage to gain coverage—the uninsured. … Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that about one million uninsured Americans will sign up for the ObamaCare exchanges before open enrollment ends. For perspective, that’s about 2% of the 48 million uninsured. A larger share of the exchange enrollees is likely coming from people whose previous coverage was canceled (due to other ObamaCare rules) or those who found a somewhat better deal for exchange coverage (due to much more generous low-income subsidies).
Wow, just 2 percent of the uninsured. That’s a high failure rate, even by government standards.
