The High and Lows of ObamaCare - The Irony of It All

ObamaCare peaked early - the day it passed on March 23, 2010. Passage epitomized the 100 year old progressive dream of a national health care bill. Senator Edward Kennedy said it best at the 1980 Democratic convention, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream lives on. Well, Democrats gave birth to their dream that glorious day.

But after birth, troubles set in. The American public was against it at the onset. The dream that the public would come to love it didn’t happen. Then there’s was wet nurse Nancy Pelosi’s admission that no one had read it, “We’ll have to pass it to see what’s in it.” There was the jarring recognition that it was being raised in a single parent political family. Not a single Republican had voted for it. This hadn’t happened with any national piece of legislation. It set the stage for more than 30 Republican bills in the House and Senate asking for repeal or defunding. The Democrats lost two midterm elections, in 2012 and 2014, largely on the basis of opposition to ObamaCare. Dashed promises about keeping your doctor or your health plan or having your premiums lowered followed, and those Jonathon Gruber’s revelations that all of these things were known early on. There were those health plan cancellations , those soaring premiums, rising deductibles, troubles finding doctors, and the bumbling technological incompetence of the health exchange launch and those glitches that kept popping up , fixes that never seemed to be completed, and delays that never seemed to end. There were signs of life and hope, of course, the number signing up for subsidies went up and the rate of uninsured went down. But then, it became apparent that as many as 7 million of those enrolled may have been subsidized illegally if the government and the IRS had adhered to the letter of the law that subsidies were to go only to those in exchanges “established by the state.” In addition to all of this, Americans didn’t like those coercive mandates, that you either had to have a plan or pay a penalty, that you either had to insure your employees or pay a fine. America was the home of the free and the land of choice, not a place where a central government controlled your lives and dictated what you did. But the dream’s single parent took heart, the Supreme Court might save the fledging infant , now approaching 5 years old, in 2015, as it had in 2012.