Adventures in Obamacare

Yesterday’s adventures brought us the appearance of the contractors for the Obamacare Web site that, according to supporters of the law (or “law” or, until recently, sacred “law of the land”) has been plagued by a dire combination of glitches and kinks. The contractor witnesses appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Wall Street Journal’s account of the witnesses’ testimony is secured snugly behind the Journal’s jealously guarded subscription paywall, so I recommend Robert Pear’s New York Times article “Contractors assign blame, but admit no faults of their own, in Web site.” The Times’s account can be supplemented by the Washinton Post’s “Full testing of Healthcare.gov began too late, contractors say.”

The witnesses’ finger-pointing testimony foreshadowed that of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius before the committee next week. I haven’t thought about Freddie Prinze in a long time, but the testimony yesterday brought him to mind. If there was a long story short to the contractors’ testimony, it was the old Freddie Prinze catchphrase: “Eees not my job!”

In the category of continuing adventures, we have the cancellation of millions of individual health insurance policies as a result of Obamacare. Obamacare has consigned millions of affordable health insurance policies to the ash heap of history. Michelle Malkin told the story in the first person last month in “Obama lied, my health plan died.” The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack updated the story this week in “Millions of Americans are losing their health plans because of Obamacare.” McCormack links to Robert Laszewski’s estimate that 16 million Americans have shared the Malkins’ fate.

My point, and I do have one, comes in two parts. Obamacare is an enormous engine of destruction. Its destructive effects materialize before our eyes.

And Obamacare is built on a foundation of lies, one of which was Obama’s endlessly repeated mantra: “If you like your insurance plan you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”

It’s hard to miss. Even CBS News has taken notice — even if it was baked in the cake three and a a half years ago, even if it is late to the party, even if it adds an annoying twist, even if this lie is just the first of the foundational lies it has blundered onto.

This is my refrain: If only we had a free press, Obamacare would be a bloody, unrelenting scandal, like Abu Ghraib, or Watergate. As it is, it is only business as usual for liberals and liberalism.

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