The Obamacare Debacle

If one wanted to sum up the consequences of the entire 2012 election in a single issue, look no farther than Obamacare.

The new health-care law is generally regarded as the signature achievement of the president’s first term. It’s certainly emblematic of Obama’s entire approach to government and what we can expect from his second-term initiatives.
The president promised a great deal of benefits from health-care reform: lower premiums, better care, universal coverage. He reassured Americans: If you had health insurance, and you liked it, you could keep it. The bill’s gross ten-year cost would be less than $1 trillion, and the legislation would actually reduce the deficit in the long run. The rich and some big businesses might have to pay a bit more in taxes, but the middle class would be better off.
But as with so many other policies of this administration, the results never matched the rhetoric. The pretty promises turned out to be “just words.”
Rather than work across the aisle, President Obama pushed his bill through on a purely partisan basis, using dubious parliamentary maneuvers and refusing to consider Republican alternatives. Nor was the president deterred by public opinion. Polls consistently showed that Americans opposed the president’s plan — they still do — but the president insisted on doing it his way.
The president who always prefers government to markets unsurprisingly produced a costly new entitlement program, financed by both new taxes and massive debt, that relies on top-down planning. The $1 trillion price tag has been left far behind. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will now cost at least $1.8 trillion through 2022, and other estimates suggest it could cost as much as $2.2 trillion over that period if all costs are taken into account, adding more than $823 billion to the deficit over ten years.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333426/obamacare-debacle-michael-tanner