The Bad Apple President
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
In 2012, voters had the opportunity to exchange their bad apple president for a better model. They chose to stick with their substandard model which lacked experience and ethics, was known to pull all sorts of bad apple scams and acted like it was the Wild Wild West when it came to following the law.
Turn on your television. Keep flipping the channels past the infomercials, the reality shows and the music videos and you'll hear it.
The problem only affects a small (millions large) sliver of the population. The plans being cancelled were substandard. Health plans aren't lost; they're transitioning to new health opportunities. The private marketplace was an unregulated Wild Wild West where villainous deductibles went around with guns blazing through the office of the town sawbones.
The insurers decided to cancel the plans for reasons having nothing to do with the government. These were "bad apple plans" that the insurers didn't even want to sell anymore. They couldn't sell the plans anymore because they had changed too much. (Such as increasing the co-pay by 5 bucks.)
Leave the television on CNN, MSNBC or your local news and between weather and sports, you'll hear these lies peddled by Obama, his advisors and staffers, and assorted Democratic Party figures reciting the same talking points about the Wild Wild West where Bad Apple plans roamed the frontier
And every word of it is a lie.
The people losing their plans didn't have substandard plans. They had a wide variety of plans from light to bulletproof. The insurance marketplace wasn't unregulated. There is no such thing as an unregulated marketplace except when your neighbor's kid start selling lemonade from a box crate; and even then the local authorities have been known to come by and demand a business license.
It isn't a small sliver of the population that's affected; even assuming that the population of a European country could be classified as a small sliver. Once the employer-based plans are affected, nearly 100 million people will lose their health plans. Or in Obamaspeak, will be transitioned to a new opportunity with higher premiums and deductibles for less coverage.
The forced cancellation of health plans for nearly 100 million people is not routine marketplace churn. It's the result of regulations written for ObamaCare by Obama's bureaucracy which are calculated to disqualify as many grandfathered plans as possible.
Obama's new caveat to his infamous promise, "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan", but "only if it hadn't changed since the law passed" neglects to mention that his people made it so that even the mildest and most meaningless of changes will kill a plan and dump another victim into the ObamaCare mess.
Repeat the same process nearly 100 million times and you have the opening round of ObamaCare; the law we had to pass to find out just how terrible it was. While the spokesmen spin the tragedy to make it seem as if the millions losing their health plans now will be the last ones, a small sliver, they're only the first of many.
100 million people aren't even a small sliver of China or India... let alone the United States of America. It's far more than the number of people who voted for Obama. It's twenty times the size of his margin of victory. If that's a small sliver of the population that can be disregarded when their insurance plans are taken out back and shot, then they can also be disregarded when they voted for Obama.
The problem is not that there were nearly 100 million bad apple insurance plans out there. The people complaining about losing their plans didn't have bad apple plans... they had a bad apple president.
The man in the White House was a substandard model who relied on a Wild Wild West of unregulated executive power to set up an illegal law, tamper with it freely and then dump it on the country, while protecting a small sliver of allies in key unions and the government from what he had done to the rest of the country.
The insurers weren't angels, but they had no interest in screwing up health care for almost 100 million people. Businesses don't think that big. Governments do.
American health care has grown worse with each government intervention. Doctors are accused of playing G-d, but it's really the government bureaucrats, the politicians and the professional medical ethicists who have never treated a patient but insist on drawing up lists of who should live and who should die and which people are the biggest burden on health care, which do.
Now the bad apple president has screwed up their health care in a big way and is blaming anyone and everyone except his bad apple self.
His spokesmen have blamed insurers, patients, Republicans, the internet and a solar eclipse for the chain of disasters that began with the ObamaCare website deploying like a parachute tied to an anvil and concluding with the Halloween Massacre of health care plans followed by rate hikes and empty promises of subsidies.
President Truman had a sign on his desk that said, "The buck stops here." Barack Obama has a rug that reads, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself”, “No Problem of Human Destiny is Beyond Human Beings”, “The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us” and “The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice”
There is nothing in any of those vaguely inspiring collectivist quotes about responsibility or accountability. They assume that government is an unrestricted good whose purpose is only fulfilled through social justice.
Taken together they encourage action without contemplation. Fear is not the only thing that government should fear. It should also fear to destroy the fragile social compact between the people and their government that makes freedom possible. It should fear that its actions will cause more harm than good. It should also fear that it is not nearly as wise as it thinks it is.
The empty grandiosity of the rug across which the bad apple president walks flatters his ego. It is a long way from the memento mori of the Roman general whose servant would interject into displays of grandiosity the warning, "Remember thou art mortal."
The grandiose rug is the reflection of a bad apple president who lies like a much cheaper rug. To every setback, he offers another lie, another talking point and another villain. Every time one of his grandiose rug-inspired plans collapses, he rejects the implication of mortality with another barrel of bad apple lies.
Health plan cancellations become opportunities, old plans become substandard plans, the over-regulated insurance becomes the Wild Wild West and the lost plans are bad apples.
If Obama had any humility, his rug would read simply, "Memento Mori"; an acknowledgement that life is fragile, death is inevitable and human capabilities limited in the face of their own mortality. It's not that we shouldn't resist death and fight to extend life, but that we must do so knowing that the power to temporarily give life or take it away does not make us immortal or infallible.
Ethics come from humility. The recognition of our own mortality teaches us our limitations. The worst tyrants and monsters, like Joseph Stalin, did not believe that they would die. The USSR's persecution of doctors was motivated by its leader's faith in his own immortality.
That is why Healthcare.gov does not work. It's why ObamaCare is such a disaster.
A standard model president understands risks and consequences. A substandard model like Obama does not. A good apple president apologizes when he chops down a cherry tree. A bad apple president blames Bush, the cherry tree, the axe and Global Warming.
The American people are being lied to every day by a bad apple president who covers up one lie with another lie and pastes an even crazier lie on top.
Unfortunately their opportunity to trade in their bad apple president for a fully regulated model that is compliant with the United States Constitution and all subsidiary documents will not come again until the next presidential open enrollment period.
