I have a very low opinion of Ezra Klein, and idiotic shit like this only helps to confirm my belief he is a moron of epic proportions. Let’s take a look at what is bothering this imbecilic and has his panties all in a bunch this time. It’s a doozy, I tell you:
Ever heard the line “no plan survives first contact with the enemy?” Well, no big law ever fully survives first contact with reality. There are always provisions that prove poorly drafted, or parts that don’t elicit quite the behavior you expected. Then there are the parts that work better than you expected, and which you want to expand.
Medicare was signed into law in 1965. In 1967, Congress passed a bill making a suite of technical changes and modest reforms to the new program. They did the same in 1972. The 1986 immigration bill was corrected in 1988. Social Security was altered in 1939, and has been changed time and again in the intervening years. Medicare Part D’s difficult implementation process led to Democrats calling hearings to gather ideas on how to fix it. This is how it should be. Laws are written on paper, not stone. They can be easily changed.
Usually.
In today’s New York Times, Jonathan Weisman and Robert Pear report on a peculiar problem faced by the Affordable Care Act: Republicans who’re unable to repeal it also refuse to permit any tweaks or technical correction that would help it work better. In fact, they’re creating new problems by withholding implementation funds.
This is a real problem for the law, and for the country. Back in January 2011, I called it the biggest danger for health reform, and I still think that’s right: If it persists, “what America will get is not the Affordable Care Act, and nor will it be repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It’ll be a hobbled version of the Affordable Care Act, where what works isn’t expanded and what fails isn’t replaced. And though that might be better than nothing for the uninsured, it will be pretty terrible policy.”
My first instinct is to just say WTF?, Then wonder if he is being serious, but I am going to logically and calmly walk through Ezra’s hissy fit and show how insane these fucking collectivist scumbags really are.
Let’s start with Ezra’s complaint which basically boils down to Republicans are to blame for Obamacare not working. Maybe we need to revisit some history, or not, especially considering how idiotic and outright deceptive this new accusation that the ACA is broken because of republicans, is.
Let’s start by reminding people that Pelosi told us we had to pass the ACA monstrosity to find out what was in it, and even the left, which back then tried hard to pretend that’s not what she said, or once it was confirmed she had said it, what she meant, no longer pretend s that is otherwise. Also remember that taxpayers footed the bill for the many pay-offs needed to get enough democrats on board to vote for this horrible bill – such as the $4.3 billion payoff referred to as “The New Louisiana Purchase”, which bought Marry Landrieu’s vote, and the many others outlined by people such as Malkin – before the ACA was passed on a purely partisan vote. We all are now seeing, firsthand, what’s in it that bill Pelosi told us to pass. One nightmare after another came to light, as we got to see what the donkeys packed their “Frankenstein government healthcare takeover” bill with, including the fact that Obamacare was a job killer, which caused the democrats, in a callous attempt to save their asses come the 2014 election, to delay the mandate (and mandate here doesn’t refer to 2 guys going out on a date).
Where have republicans stood on this onstrosity? Well, they have repeatedly failed attempts to repeal of ACA in Senate, and then, on a party line vote. Guess which party continues to try and save this economy crushing and job killing bill? Yeah, the same party Klein is so eager to drop down and suck cock for, as he pretends the problem with the ACA is evil republicans and not that the ACA gives new meaning to dysfunctional and reality-challenged stupidity. Let’s get back to more Klein stupidity.
There’s both a strategy and a principle at play here. The GOP really, truly hates Obamacare. They believe that their best chance to repeal it is to make it as big a mess as possible. Anything that makes it easier to live with makes it harder to get rid of. But they know that the chances of repeal are pretty slim. That’s where the politics come in. They think their best chance to retake the Senate in 2014 is to make Obamacare as big a mess as possible and then ride the outrage in the midterms.
They may be right about that, or they may be very wrong. But this is a theory that requires Republicans to knowingly damage America’s health-care system on the off-chance the damage is severe enough to help them accomplish a much larger policy goal. It’s a theory that requires them to choose to let problems fester because the pain is more politically useful than the cure.
The GOP hates Obamacare because it is a horrible law. Only fucking idiots believe you can offer 35 million plus more people “free healthcare”, without a major change to the existing capability and infrastructure, and while maintaining the same quality and access, while reducing cost, like the donkeys pretended they could with this piece of shit law. This isn’t free. And the gimmicks used to fooled no one but the people that wanted to be fooled. The CBO report that pretended Obamacare was going to actually reduce the deficit was laughable. Let’s point out a few obvious flaws these bastards tried real hard to pretend didn’t matter. First off, the CBO scoring window of 10 years was picked precisely to help fool people about costs. Then they set things up so they could immediately start collecting taxes and penalties while waiting 5 years before it started paying out anything. It’s not an accident that as time has gone by the CBO has had to rescore the numbers and ACA costs have drastically gone up while savings have vanished. Even more deceptive was the double counting around some horribly fudged Medicare money schemes and scams. And there is just too many other fundamentally insane and bad things wrong with this bill to go into, but in general, reality has shown, with announcement after announcement, like this one of costs drastically going up for all of us, that Obamacare is a disaster. You have to be an imbecile living in lala-land to still argue this bill is viable or anything but destructive and bad.
This isn’t about republicans trying to take advantage of democrats come the election either. Klein would love for people to really believe the issue is the intransigent and evil rethuglicans, and not that the ACA is an unworkable disaster. What we have here is democrats realizing how horrible Obamacare’s impact to the economy and healthcare system of our country will be, and then trying, desperately, to postpone the pain so they can avoid a massacre at the polls when people find out how bad they have been screwed. This thing cannot be fixed. That’s the fact. But the left can’t admit that’s the case. So the usual agents are all coming out of the woodwork to shift blame. They are at a huge disadvantage because no republican voted for this unmitigated disaster of a law, but that won’t stop them from trying. With people like Klein, willing and ready to lie for them, I can’t blame them.
Ideology and the fact that the left’s objective was never to fix anything, but to cement its hold on power, will prevent them from doing the right thing: killing the ACA dead. Obamacare is destroying the economy. It is a major job killer. The costs of Obamacare are astronomical, and there will be no deficit reduction. In fact, it will tack trillions to our deficit spending and debt as it spirals out of control. And the most important thing, what this monstrosity was intended to do from the start, is that it will destroy the current healthcare system. It will drive up costs, reduce quality, result in restricted and controlled access – likely with bureaucrats determining who gets care or not based on political criteria like we saw the IRS do to protect donkeys in the 2012 election – and basically bring healthcare in the US to its knees. In the end the big losers will be the American people. But that’s been the goal from the start: take it over, destroy it, and when left with no option, give the American people a government controlled single payer system that cements the donkey’s hold on power permanently. Fuck Klein and the left for that. Kill Obamacare.