From: Gary L. Bauer
Millions Will Lose Current Policies
Yesterday I reported that hundreds of thousands of people had received notices from their health insurance companies cancelling their current policies. It turns out that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Millions of Americans are going to lose their existing coverage.
The Weekly Standard reports that health policy expert Bob Laszewski has analyzed the impact of Obamacare’s complex regulations on the individual health insurance market. According to his findings, 85% of existing individual plans do not comply with Obamacare. Translation: 16 million people will lose their current policies.
Think about that. That’s 16 million people, many are small business owners, who have been responsible enough to buy their own health insurance. Now Big Government is telling them in effect, “You can’t keep your current policy, no matter how much you liked it. And, by the way, the new one will probably cost even more!”
Democrat Demand Delay
The Obama White House and congressional liberals are scrambling to respond to the Obamacare “train wreck.” They should have seen it coming. Not only did conservatives warn them years ago when they passed Obamacare without a single GOP vote, but even senior Senate Democrats tried to warn them.
Six months ago, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the principle authors of Obamacare, chastised HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, saying, “I just see a huge train wreck coming down. You and I have discussed this many times, and I don’t see any results yet.”
But realizing the mess they are in, the White House and its congressional allies are proposing a really radical solution: Now they want to delay Obamacare!
The administration announced it is delaying for six weeks the deadline to sign up for Obamacare and avoid the individual mandate penalty for not having insurance. The initial deadline was February 15th. Now it is March 31st. The White House took this step after increasingly nervous Senate Democrats demanded it.
But Democrats are not stopping there. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is drafting legislation to delay Obamacare’s individual mandate for one year.
Where have I heard that idea before? Oh, right — House Republicans proposed delaying the individual mandate by one year as part of a budget deal to avoid the government shutdown. For that they were denounced as “radicals,” “hostage takers” and worse.
Moral Relativism & The Left
Traditional morality teaches that lying, cheating and stealing are wrong. But the philosophical left argues that morality is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re serving the left’s greater cause, the ends justify the means. Lying can be okay in order to stop “Neanderthal” conservatives.
Over the years, the left has engaged in lying more and more frequently as a political tactic. When thousands of people came to Washington in March 2010 to rally against Obamacare, liberal members of Congress intentionally walked through the middle of that rally rather than use the vast complex of trams and tunnels that run underneath Capitol Hill, which allow members of Congress to avoid the “smelly tourists.”
As they walked through the crowd, some members of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed they were spat on. In this age of instant cell phone videos, no evidence was ever produced to support that charge. Yet that incident has been repeatedly cited as evidence of the rampant racism within the Tea Party movement.
I have experienced the same tactics. During a recent speech, I said that the nihilistic left wants to kill Judeo-Christian civilization. A leftwing blogger funded by George Soros and assigned to monitor my speech wrote, “Bauer just said liberals want to kill Christians.” That lie is now in the blogosphere and will be repeated over and over again. People who come across it will assume I am an extremist for saying something I never said.
Here’s the latest example. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who infamously compared our guards at Gitmo to Nazis, posted this on his Facebook page over the weekend:
- “Many Republicans searching for something to say in defense of the disastrous shutdown strategy will say President Obama just doesn’t try hard enough to communicate with Republicans. But in a ‘negotiation’ meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: ‘I cannot even stand to look at you.’ What are the chances of an honest conversation with someone who has just said something so disrespectful?”
The public is being told over and over again that House Republicans are dominated by the Tea Party movement, which is dominated by racists. Now Durbin claims that one GOP House leader is so racist he can’t even stand to look at Obama.
Desperate for a top GOP scalp, the White House press corps pummeled Press Secretary Jay Carney yesterday demanding to know who the offending congressman was. Alas, Carney had to disappoint them. He told the muckrakers that the incident never happened.
Nevertheless, Durbin is sticking by his claim and the post has not been removed from his Facebook page.
The Huffington Post said the story came from Harry Reid, who said he got it from a White House aide. You’ll recall that Harry Reid repeatedly claimed last year that “an extremely credible source” told him that Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes for ten years. That also turned out be false.
And that’s all you need to know about the state of political discourse in Washington.
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