It occurred to me how hard it’s going to be to reverse Obamacare now.
It’s extremely unlikely anything could happen in the next four years now - I can’t imagine we get a supermajority in the senate next election - only 1/3rd of the senate runs at a time and a good portion of them will be Republicans and Democrats in secure seats. So, nothing’s going to happen with it until the start of 2017 at the earliest.
Most of Obamacare has not yet taken effect yet. Come the start of next year a series of similarly seemingly insignificant portions of the bill hit - medicare payment bundling, extensions to CHIP, etc. But it’s the start of 2014, just over a year from now, that all of the major provisions hit - preexisting condition bans, coverate limit bans, the creation of the “exchanges” (which include a stealth public option), expansion of medicare, health tax credits for uninsured individuals making under $43k and married couples making under $88k, a corresponding credit for businesses, and of course, to go with those, the mandates to buy coverage.
These will be in place for nearly three years before the election. You know how hard it is to get people off the government’s teat once they get hooked to it (social security, medicare, etc)? 3 years is more than enough time to get people used to it. They’ll simply get used to being poorer and it’ll be easy to scare them about going back to a free market system.
It gets worse if we lose the house in 2014, and I know we don’t want to think about that, but as this election showed, whether from fraud, apathy, or complacency, we can’t simply count on votes to just go our way. If they get the house, or worse if they get enough RINOs to give them “bipartisan” cover, they’ll increase the subsidies for buying insurance while keeping the mandate and gaming the exchanges against the private insurers for the promotion of the public option. It’d end up a full-fledged European-style national health service, and could be in place for a year and a half before the 2016 election.
In an ironic way, Obamacare may actually be our path out of this.
Everyone knows that the CBO LIED LIED LIED LIED about all of the cost projections. It is quickly going to go viral and consume nearly all of the Federal Budget and then some. The day of reckoning will come sooner not later.
Using the term “tar baby” in respect to Obama is no doubt RAAAACIST. But that’s what’s coming.