ObamaCare is a “super-welfare” program that Americans can’t afford and don’t want, it has been advanced through sheer ideological willfulness by President Obama and the Democratic Congress, and it not only calls into question our country’s future finances and medicine but raises crucial questions about the nature of a free society.
Just before the final House vote, Rep. Paul Ryan argues that this debate is about what kind of country we are going to be in the 21st century.
ObamaCare’s mandate that states reimburse primary-care doctors under Medicaid at the same rate as under Medicare, creates a funding cliff in 2015 — when the federal government’s promise to pick up the tab would expire, leaving states on the hook for an estimated $5.5 billion a year.
President Obama’s White House Budget Director Peter Orszag explains that the newly created Medicare Commission, or Independent Payment Advisory Board, would possess “an enormous amount of potential power,” including “statutory power” to institute proposals that wouldn’t have to be sanctioned by Congress and couldn’t even be overturned by Congress without the President’s approval.
Obamacare is designed to push people into a system that won’t exist — a health-care bridge to nowhere — and, thus, merely living with it isn’t an option. The only options are repeal, or taking further steps toward an eventual government monopoly.
ObamaCare bears about as much resemblance to the Heritage Foundation’s ideas for empowering patients and lowering costs as a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese does to a salad.
Evidence of a significant free-rider problem in Massachusetts may be a harbinger of things to come under Obamacare.
If not repealed, ObamaCare would expand and cement a system that is replete with fraud, without getting serious about reducing that fraud.
Robert A. Levy argues that Obamacare’s mandate to purchase health insurance is not authorized under Congress’s power to “lay and collect taxes.”
Obamacare would offer major financial rewards for couples who live together but avoid marriage — and it’s extreme marginal tax-rates on a marriage’s second income would provide a strong incentive for the lower-earning spouse (most often the woman) to leave the workforce.