Don’ts for ObamaCare

Don’t Overstandardize - Don’t try to homogenize health plans by making every plan have the same set of essential benefits. Different folks for different folks have different needs, and they may resent paying for others.


Don’t Rely on Data - Don’t use data exclusively to judge outcomes, to separate good physicians from bad, to use as basis for payments. People often make decisions based on hearts, guts, and principles, rather than on data. Data has human limitations.


Don’t Restrict Choice - America is a land of choice and freedom to choose what one wants to choose, to live where one wants to move, to choose one’s occupation, to pick one’s own doctor rather than a physician in a government or insurance network.

Don’t Mandate - At the heart of the unpopularity of Obamacare are those cursed individual, employer, religious, and health plan mandates. People do not liked to be forced to do what the government wants them to do. They do not want to be compelled to have a health plan or pay a penalty.

Don’t Over- Promise - Promises may be the life-blood of liberal politics, but broken promises on keeping your doctor and your health plan and lowering your premiums will come back to haunt you.


Don’t Be Too Clever - Don’t be too tricky, as you were when you created the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act to bypass the Senate and get ObamaCare enacted. Two can play this game. Unilateral executive actions and Congressional bypasses will not work in the long run.


Don’t Demonize Or Be Too Dismissive of Your Opponents - They are simply trying to satisfy their constituents in order to be re-elected. Ridicule begets retaliation, and personalization of differences is counterproductive.


Don’t Obfuscate Your Arguments through the use of lofty words or devious solipsisms or putting up strawmen, who never said you claim they said. You may fool some of the voters some of the time but not all of the voters all of the time. Rhetoric always comes to roost in the form of reality. Don’t be too inebriated by the exuberance of your verbosity.


Don’t’ Rely on Trust in Government - Trust in government is a fickle thing in a decentralized center-right country like America, especially when people look closely at budget deficits and taxes which leave them worst off than before without measurable improvements in their lives, incomes, and opponents. Politics is cyclical, and don’t you forget it.

Don’t Rely on Young to Save Or Majorities to Rescue Minorities. Don’t pit one class against anothe4rl. Redistribution of wealth and health may be a moral imperative for some, but not for the young and ambitious or the middle class and or those seeking opportunity to rise above the common herd.


Don’t Bet on Free Lunch – It’s true, there is no such thing as a free bureaucratic lunch. Sooner or later, someone must pay the government Piper. Who is the fairest of them all - big government or free-markets?

Don’t Under-estimate Doctors - Doctors are not serfs of government. They are free to choose where they practice, what specialties they choose, whether to accept Medicare, Medicare, and health exchange plan patients, and to negotiate with patients what they can afford as long at doctors remain in independent practice, free of the fetters of government.