Free Republic

If you want a preview of President Obama's health-care "reform," take a look at Massachusetts. In 2006, it enacted a "reform" that became a model for Obama. What's happened since isn't encouraging. The state did the easy part: expanding state-subsidized insurance coverage. It evaded the hard part: controlling costs and ensuring that spending improves people's health. Unfortunately, Obama has done the same. Like Obama, Massachusetts requires most individuals to have health insurance (the "individual mandate"). To aid middle-class families too well-off to qualify for Medicaid -- government insurance for the poor -- the state subsidizes insurance for people with incomes...

ObamaCare, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is bad news for U.S. workers. Strike One: ObamaCare is fiscally dangerous, raising the risk of higher taxes all around — including taxes on labor at a time when the job market is struggling. Strike Two: ObamaCare creates strong incentives for employers — even while holding workers financial harmless — to drop employer-sponsored health insurance for as many as 35 million Americans. This is sure to lead to widespread turmoil in labor compensation, employee insurance coverage and labor relations. Strike Three: ObamaCare slaps big increases in effective marginal tax...

This week, we learned that the Obama administration is orchestrating a $125 million propaganda campaign to sell the recently enacted health-care law to the public.  That effort will be funded by labor unions and other groups from the Democratic political orbit.  It comes on top of the misleading government mailer sent to the nation’s seniors, at the expense of taxpayers, touting the supposed benefits of ObamaCare for the elderly.  On Tuesday, the president himself will join the fray again to make the sales pitch, this time promoting the colossal waste of taxpayer money associated with $250 per senior bribes to...