A Three-Year Obamacare Moratorium

Slowly but surely President Obama is unwinding, rolling back, and even cancelling his very own Obamacare. A couple of years ago he told Republicans not to mess with his plan. He said he’d veto any changes. But now, in substantial ways, he’s messing with his own plan.

By various counts, the president has made 25 to 30 key changes to the Affordable Care Act. They all violate the legislation passed in 2010. Many believe Obama’s executive actions are unlawful or unconstitutional. Whatever the case, at this rate, there may not be much if any Obamacare in the next couple of years.

While many individuals in Congress -- like Richard Burr, Tom Coburn, Orrin Hatch, and Ron Johnson in the Senate, and Paul Ryan, Tom Price, Steve Scalisse, Devin Nunes in the House (among others) -- have come up with good ideas to change Obamacare, they lack the bully pulpit. So there’s a certain scattershot effect here, even though their ideas are good ones.

So how about this simple 2014 campaign idea: The Republicans, as a party, tell the voters that if they keep the House and recapture the Senate, they will immediately push for a three-year moratorium on Obamacare.

On all of it: The mandates. The time extensions. The taxes. The regulations. The job losses. The reductions in hours worked. The part-time hiring. The website. The potential taxpayer bailout of insurance companies. The verification of income. The lack of personal security and threat of ID theft. And the whole wet blanket that Obamacare has thrown over the economy and the health-care system.

The GOP should simply say, “Elect us and we will put a three-year moratorium on all of Obamacare. And then we’ll go back to the drawing board, bringing in Republicans and Democrats, and figure out a better plan.”

The three years would begin in early 2015, after the midterms, and a new health-care plan would be reported out of Congress in 2017, after the presidential elections. It would be lawful and constitutional. It would promote true health-care freedom and economic growth. And it would replace a catastrophe created by Team Obama that has so befuddled businesses, individuals, doctors, patients, and the whole one-fifth of the economy we call health care.

During that three-year moratorium, all the good ideas being generated by individual Republicans and Democrats would come to the front. There would be full debate on the whole subject. And a political fact that’s largely been missing from the current debate could be acknowledged right away: President Obama doesn’t like his own product. He needs help. And the GOP can give it to him.

This time, we won’t be doing it Nancy Pelosi’s way. We won’t have to wait until it’s passed to know what’s in it. And we won’t have the unfortunate experience of witnessing a first-attempt failure. This time, a three-year timeout will produce a product shaped by the very best policy thinkers we have.

In recent days, President Obama extended the business mandate for yet another year. It’s the second time he’s done so. The individual mandate and various tax penalties and regulations began their extensions over the past few months. Further extensions are coming as Team Obama grapples with more pink-slip cancellations, website breakdowns, enrollment and payment quandaries, and the huge verification issue. All the while, the young are still not signing up at a high-enough volume.

But various one-year extensions don’t solve problems, they merely postpone them. Businesses are not going to take longer-term risks to hire based on temporary fixes.

Frankly, no one has any idea how or when or where the final Obamacare story will be written. What we have now is a solution looking for a system. But what we need is a system that will create a solution.

And whatever new system is created, it must end the government mandates and install true health-care freedom. Consumers should be able to buy any plans they want, generated by insurance companies responding to consumer choice. Tax penalties should be turned into tax credits. Health savings accounts, interstate shopping, and tort reform must be included. Sick people must be taken care of, and the indigent must have a safety net.

And the emphasis should be on catastrophic insurance -- which is the only real insurance -- rather than some pre-planned health-care financing system dreamed up by a bunch of academic eggheads who have never held a job in the private sector, much less in the private health-care sector.

The GOP can come together on the simple campaign issue of a three-year moratorium. Doing so will signal common sense open-mindedness to the electorate and stop the Obamacare bleeding. Then, together, Congress can come up with a plan that will truly make America healthier.

A BOOBAMBA BLUNDER OF CEAUSESCUIAN PROPORTIONS First came the 2009 launch, then Obama's incessant "Keep-it" Lies, then the Oct 2013 botched healthcare.gov rollout....

Today, the proportion of Americans NOT covered is much higher than it was as of January 20, 2009. More people have LOST coverage under Obamacare than are enrolled, or expect to be enrolled......actual “coverage” provided by ACA is riddled w/ unaffordable high monthly costs, ruinous deductibles, spotty coverage, with doctors refusing to sign on.

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SO MUCH FOR THAT LIE Lab specimen Nancy Pelosi keeps swearing the Dems are gonna run and win on the (gag) "glories" of Obamacare....but a PAC associated with Nancy Pelosi financed a TV ad for a candidate who slams the White House for “the disastrous healthcare.gov website”.....then boasts that the candidate “voted to let you keep your existing health plan.”

LIES AND MORE LIES Obama's "Keep Your Plan promise" has been cited as The Lie Of The Year." To stimulate Dem aye votes, Pelosi asserted Obamacare would create thousands of jobs......as industry spox recently announce 33,000 jobs lost.....based on ACA's medical devices tax.

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Yoo, Hoo, Nancy---better call home. Nancy has apparently not heard the news that a (gasp) Republican won the San Diego Mayor's race by a hefty margin.

THAT SUCKING SOUND YOU HEARD Feinstein, Boxer AND Obama all endorsed the Democrat loser Alvarez. An omen of things to come? Could this be the reason why (cackle)?

As far back as 2008, at the presidential debate in Nashville, Democrat candidate Obama advanced his signature healthcare plan---ultimately enacted, by an historic straight Democrat party-line vote, into the "Affordable Care Act"

QUOTING 2008 OBAMA: "No. 1, let me just repeat, if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor.”

Repeated over and over again---- with his promise that every American family would be saving $2500.00 on healthcare costs.

Significantly, Obamba NEVER corrected lock-stepping Democrats, all reading from the same Democrat talking points, all of them repeating the same Democrat promises---over and over again.

LOCK-STEPPING PARTY LOYALTY NOT SEEN SINCE 1930-40's ERA EUROPE Obama And the Dems marched in lockstep.....the persistent Dumbocrat drumbeat ---- in obeisance to Obama ---- kept ringing reassuringly in our ears: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-CALIF): “So we Democrats want people to be able to keep the health care they have. And the answer to that is choice of plans. And in the state exchange, we’re going to have lots of different plans, and people will be able to keep the health care coverage they need and they want.” (Sen. Boxer, Press Release, 2/8/11)

SEN DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CALI): “I listened to the president and I believed him when he said, 'if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.' I believed he was correct. I didn't realize there were all these codicils attached to it. President Obama should never have promised that people would be able to keep their health plans. I think he was done a disservice. Someone should have stopped him and said – on his staff. There's this condition and that condition."

THEN-HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER NANCY PELOSI (D-CALIF): "We must pass the O-care bill so we can find out what’s in it." Tick, tock, tick tock,......we must now wait 1-2 decades for its "goodness" to rollout.

For the smartest people in the world (I know because they keep telling us that) they are sure stupid sometimes.

The goal is to get as many signed up as possible (so that it would be impossible to repeal).

If they had done one thing then they would not be facing the resistance they are today.

They should have “grandfathered” all existing insurance plans. If this administration’s promise of keeping your existing plan was true, most people would not have cared that we were slowly drifting into socialism.

Instead they dropped the frog (us)into the boiling water, and we hurt.

I don’t have much hope that the law will be repeal since I have come to the conclusion that the Republican elites want it as well. There have been a number of times this law could have been blocked and or repealed but the Republican elites have not done so. They are running out the clock with the hope that enough people will be forced to join the socialized medicine that it will be impossible to repeal.

Then the Republicans will say they tried but could not do it.

Pox on both parties as they are all traitors.

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