My Beef with Obamacare

I’m on the front lines here, folks. At my job, the finger pointed, and it fell on me, with a disembodied voice saying, “Thou shalt be the liaison between the Company and the Affordable Care Act.”

Then there were chuckles all about, and I was admonished to always put that word affordable betwixt quotation marks.

All kidding aside, Obamacare is something that incites a mixture of varying levels of fear, anger, and confusion among not only members of management and ownership here, but also in the hundred and sixty employees I deal with on a daily basis.

Now as I’ve said before, I’m not an expert on the law. Also as I’ve said before, I think there’s less than a handful of people in the country who are. Many may know all that’s in the two-thousand-plus page law (and by “many” I mean maybe a few hundred country-wide), but only a handful have a grip on the ramifications of the law on the economy. And none of those handful agree.

It’s a mess. If you’ve been following the news since October 1, you know the federal and state exchanges are a mess. Embarrassingly so. Since this is the public sector we’re talking about, no one will get fired. If Apple or Facebook or Target or any major private enterprise did this sort of thing, heads of whole divisions would be pink-slipped for such utter incompetence.

In a general way, I have three major beefs with Obamacare.

1. The government can’t do anything efficiently.

Yes, the military can win wars in spectacular fashion. Cf. World War II. That is, as long as the government doesn’t interfere too much. Cf. Vietnam.

Left to itself, government has no incentive to be cost-effective or perform in a way to satisfy its customers. Indeed, if it looks at us in any way, it’s as subjects, not customers.

So get out of the health care business.

2. It’s a violation of privacy.

The government has no right to my medical history. It’s bad enough they have access to my income and earning history. I’m not so sure the Sixteenth Amendment was a great idea. Scratch that, I know it wasn’t. Anything that can separate the federal government from our money is a good thing and a step in the right direction, but that’s a subject for another post.

Do you really want some government bureaucrat – no matter how well-intentioned – to know your medical status? Is it really so far-fetched to think that some day in the future health care will not be rationed, i.e., not given to you if you are past a certain age and past a certain income-generating ability? Many, me included, are worried about this.

3. It’s a gun to your head.

For the past one hundred or so years, we’ve had to pay federal income taxes. If you don’t, you will go to jail. If you refuse to go to jail, men with guns will come to take you there. So the whole income tax thing is a gun to your head. It’s one just about all of us live with.

Now, there’s another one. We are all required to have health care, no matter what our age, state of mind, state of health, fiscal state, whatever. You gotta be insured. No exceptions.

For most of us, no problem. We want the insurance. It’s the estimated 30 million of us that is the problem. Now, some of that 30 million willingly forgo insurance. The other 25 million or so (let’s say for the sake of argument) are too poor to purchase it or else otherwise are unable to purchase it (the “pre-condition” problem).

Note I am talking about health care insurance, not health care itself. That’s a point of obfuscation that some liberals enjoy tossing about with abandon. Just listen to ’em talk on the teevee if you haven’t ever noticed it.

So to ostensibly aid 25 million Americans, 325 million Americans now have this new tax, this new gun to our heads. This leads to my final beef with Obamacare:

4. I don’t believe it will do what it is intended to do.

This is what alarms many opponents of the “Affordable” Care Act. Quite simply, by over-interference and tinkering with the free market, government will drive up rates making insurance quite unaffordable for the middle class, making providing insurance plans unprofitable for insurance companies, leading to the dreaded Single Payer health care system. Uncle Sam, or Big Brother, depending on one’s viewpoint, becomes the sole provider of health care insurance.

And when the government is the sole provider of something so essential, we can all count on an honest, condition-free, incorruptible, and non-political disbursement of that thing, right?

Right?

So there. I hope I’m wrong.