ObamaCare
Legitimacy and Coercion Problems
The
care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction us the first and lonely
legitimate object of good government.
Thomas
Jefferson (1743-1826)
The Obama administration has a problem. Americans are unhappy with its
governance. Only 30% think the country
is headed in the right direction, and only 38% approve of the health care law. Their main gripes with the health law are
denial of personal choice, distrust of big government's competence, and difficulties and frustrations of signing up for health exchange plans.
Government distrust focuses on competence - the healthcare.gov fiasco – and coercion -
the use and abuse of “mandates” to force
people to buy something they do not want – unaffordable and expensive health
exchange plans containing benefits they do not want to subsidize
others.
The healthcare.gov rollout fiasco highlights the
competence problem.
How could the
government be so incompetent as to
launch an untested website that is so hard to use?
And how could government be so unfair that it would
impose penalties on people who were unable to sign on because of the botched
website?
And what those millions of
cancelled policies?
And what of those unaffordable premiums and soaring deductibles
for the unsubsidized and those promises you could keep your doctor and
your health plan?
And those “mandates”? That’s another kettle of foul smelling
fish. \
How can you force people to buy
policies containing benefits they do not want, do not need, and will never use in order to subsidize other
people. The Obama administration has not
sold people that they must participate in the exchanges for collective action
for the common good.
As David Brooks wrote in his December 23 NYT column:
“It is pretty clear that the implementation of ObamaCare will set the tone of
how Americans think about government for years to come. There are two large questions to be settled,
which you might call competence and coercion?"
In America, with the penchant of its people for individual
choice, and given these overt displays of incompetence and mandates imposed
from above, how can you coerce people to
do what they don’t want to do, in the short-term as well as the long-term?
The
Obama administration has responded by backing and filling holes in the law, by
loosening, delaying, and suspending objectionable provisions. And now it has granted “hardship exemptions”
to those who cannot even afford bronze health plans, the cheapest of them all. Thanks to the Internet, people are used to personal and decentralized choices.
When will the exemptions never end? When will
people consider the penalties for not signing up be considered
legitimate? Maybe never. As David Brooks so trenchantly says, “Government
lacks the legitimacy to coerce.”
Tweet:
Because
of incompetent rollout of healthcare.gov and unpopularity of coerced “mandates,”
implementation of ObamaCare will be difficult.
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