What is it about Obamacare that compels seemingly intelligent people to explode in bubbling spasms of stupid? Are they misinformed? Unable to see past the rage-fueled partisan sweat dripping into their eyes? Or just plain dishonest?
No matter. At this point, it has become obvious that history will look back on the four-year war on Obamacare as one of the saddest, most bizarre, and most dishonestly embarrassing episodes of our time. I have given up trying to understand the vehement opposition of so many who cannot offer up truthful reasons for their objections, and instead fuel the hatred and fears of the uninformed with the most illogical, mendacious, and fundamentally bizarre arguments that have ever been marshaled. By comparison, Joe McCarthy’s McCarthyistic McCarthyism was an exercise in reason.
Let’s start with the obvious. We are three years into the adoption of Obamacare, with a few months to go before the next big step, when people are required to have health insurance. But no one has killed my mother yet. In fact, my wife—who is a geriatrician—is not preparing for her patient base to be wiped out in a series of “death panel” sessions. She has, however, been forced to assure patient after patient that they are not about to be murdered by Washington.
Not only that, but I’m allowed to see my own doctor—and that is not going to change. In fact, everyone who has the same insurance now that they had before won’t see any narrowing or revisions in their doctors available to them unless the insurance companies decide to make them. And guess what—that was always true.
I don’t have to contact the Oval Office to have a medical procedure. While the price of my family insurance has gone up—just like it does every year—the rate of annual increase has been lower than it has been for as long as we have had our policy.
None of this is to say there aren’t growing pains associated with Obamacare. But my question is: Where is the Armageddon that the G.O.P. has been promising will descend every year for the last few years?
