Could Obamacare be the Coup de grâce for Battered Liberal Syndrome?

Years ago I was talking to an uncle who happens to be a martial arts expert. He told me a story about being in a bar when a man started beating the heck out of his girlfriend. My uncle being my uncle, he intervened and separated the two. As he’s standing there confronting the abuser, he was attacked from behind by the girlfriend…

You hear about things like this all the time, a version of what is called “Abused Woman Syndrome” where a woman is abused by a man but continues to stay with him, and as in the story above, often defend him. Often the woman’s friends and family try and convince her that he’s bad for her, but while she admits he has his flaws, she loves him and she knows things are going to get better. Conservatives in America today find themselves in a situation similar to the one my uncle did, but the difference is, it’s not battered women that we face, but rather it’s battered liberals, and the abusers are the politicians in the Democrat Party. And while the liberals continue to stay in and empower the relationship, it’s everyone in the country who gets abused.

The Democrats have been abusing the American people for decades, and we have the scars to prove it:

Education in the United States is a train wreck. We spend more than any country on the planet on education and yet we trail most of the developed world in math, science and reading scores. Not only are students not learning the basics, but more importantly they are not learning to compete in, survive in and thrive in the real, competitive world.

Prosperity and economic growth are being strangled. In the 1950’s when the Federal Register (list of federal regulations) averaged less than 10,000 pages a year the American economy grew at an average annual rate of 4.6% a year (after inflation) – at which rate it would take you 15 years to double your income. Over the last decade when the Federal Register has weighed in at 78,000 pages a year, GDP growth has shrunk to 1.5% annually – at which rate it would take you 48 years to double your income. That means that the GDP growth – read prosperity – has declined by 65% as the Federal Register has grown by 800%.

The number of people on welfare is greater than the number of working people. The workforce is at its lowest level in three decades and those among the Democrat base (women, minorities and youth) are the most adversely affected by all of these issues.

On these and a myriad of other issues the Democrats have been abusing the American people (and in particular their own base) for decades. Nonetheless, when faced with the evidence of the Democrats abuse in the form of failed policies, they always have an excuse. Republicans want to cut education or kill Grandma or destroy the environment or let companies abuse their employees, etc. etc.. And of course the Republicans hate women, workers, blacks, immigrants and basically everyone who’s not rich and white.

And now we have what is potentially the most important event ever in the sordid history of the Battered Liberal Syndrome: Obamacare. Not only was it proffered on a false premise in the first place, it has been nothing but lies since: “If you like your plan you can keep it.” “Premium reductions will save you $2,500 per year” And the lies keep coming: “It’s the fault of the insurance companies”, “You’ll come to appreciate the better plan”, and of course the obligatory “We had no idea any of these problems would crop up.”

For so many years Democrats lied about practically everything as the failures of their policies came home to roost. Because of charlatans like Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama they could deflect blame to others for their failures and come out unscathed. But with Obamacare they are facing a different scenario all together. They own it lock, stock and barrel.

They passed the legislation on their own. They wrote the regulations. They built the website. Obama wrote the exemptions. They managed the entire process from A to Z, and they lied about every piece of it all along the way, and none more so than Barack Obama himself. As such, as the entire thing melts down there is no way for them to deflect the blame. Conservatives and many Republicans have been saying for three years that Obamacare was going to be an abject failure, it was going to cost jobs, it was going to drive up healthcare costs and it was going to expose citizens to chaos as government sought to control healthcare. All of those things have come true, and more is on the way.

The failure of Obamacare doesn’t just expose the failure of one program, but rather the failure of the Democrat philosophy in general that all things can be made right and good by simply writing a piece of legislation, throwing money at a problem or by putting the government in control. The failure of Obamacare is just a most explicit version of the policies that have brought us failing schools, the mortgage collapse, green energy sinkholes and countless other failures. The difference is, the only fingerprints on this debacle are Democratic and for the first time in history their failure is being seen as theirs alone. This is partially due to the fact that even the complicit mainstream media can’t cover up a disaster of this magnitude as Americans are seeing their plans cancelled, premiums and deductibles rise, all while choices and jobs evaporate.

Is it possible that Obamacare could be the Coup de grâce for Battered Liberal Syndrome? Perhaps this train wreck will be the incident that finally begins to shake battered liberals out of their blind devotion to the Democrat Party and liberalism. Maybe they will finally step back and look at the bigger picture and recognize that it’s results that count, not soft Democrat whispers of how it’s really someone else’s fault, how they’re just trying to make things better or fair and that they really care. You have to think that after years of battery at some point soft whispers and “good intentions” no longer matter and results finally do. At that point perhaps discussion will turn to the damage that invariably occurs when government seeks to control everything. Maybe 2013 is that point. Perhaps Obamacare is the catalyst… If so there might end up being a silver lining after all.

The Greek Tragedy of Obamacare

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where at some point you stop and ask yourself “how the hell did I end up here?” I have, and like a Greek tragedy, usually whatever predicament I found myself in was the result of a number of poor decisions that seemed to compound themselves until they finally reached a point where I had to stop and say “What the hell am I doing?” At that point I had to figure out if there was a way to extricate myself from the situation without hanging myself in the process…

That is exactly where the country is in reference to Obamacare.

Obamacare was passed in 2009 in reaction to anecdotal examples of Americans who couldn’t get healthcare. According to Gallop, in 2009 there were 50 million Americans who did not have health insurance. That represented approximately 16% of the population. Gallop also reported that of those without health insurance, fully 50% were satisfied with their healthcare. That means that fully 92% of the American population either had health insurance – 80% of whom were satisfied with that insurance – or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have insurance.

To give those numbers a bit of perspective, compare them the rest of the developed world. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development publishes the Better Life Index which ranks developed nations by a wide variety of criteria, one of which is health. According to the 2011 Better Life Index survey, in 2009 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health. Of the 34 countries covered in the data, in only two – New Zealand (89.7%) and Canada (88.1%) did citizens report a higher level of satisfaction with their health. Not the United Kingdom (76%). Not France (72.4%). Not Sweden (79.1%). Now, of course health is not healthcare, but the goal of healthcare is to improve or sustain a person’s health.

So, in 2009, when 92% of Americans had health insurance or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have it, and 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health, we got Obamacare, a 2,000 page bill that needed to be passed before it could be read.

None of that suggests that there were not people who had challenges, difficulties and, frankly, unfair situations. Those people and those difficult situations did indeed exist. But they exist in every endeavor of man in which human beings play a part. Nothing manmade is ever perfect. But 92% was pretty damn good for a country of 305 million widely diverse people. That doesn’t mean that things couldn’t have improved. From allowing a national marketplace to eliminating tax deductions to implementing tort reform, there were many proposals for improving the healthcare situation in America. No doubt those projects would not solve all of the problems. But then neither does Obamacare. By a long shot.

The problem is, Obamacare not only doesn’t do what it claimed it would do, which was to let everyone who was satisfied with their plans keep them while providing affordable insurance for all those who couldn’t get it, but it has failed in its most basic goals. Millions have lost their health insurance, millions more have seen their hours cut, if they can find a jobs in the first place, premiums are skyrocketing for tens of millions of people and the infrastructure upon which the program rests is a failure of epic proportions.

What’s worse, if that’s even possible, is that Obamacare inserts government bureaucracy and ineptitude and failure directly into the most personal lives of every American. Not only that, the regulations that Obamacare generated (fully 30 times longer than the legislation itself) are nothing but tools with which bureaucrats can provide favors for friends or punish enemies.

At the end of the day, we probably should ask ourselves: “How the hell did we get here?” The answer is actually pretty simple: It’s the 1-2-3 recipe of Liberalism. 1) Take an anecdotal problem that, while troubling, is limited in scope, and project it on the larger population. 2) Propose an overarching government solution that will solve said problem while not harming the rest of the population. 3) Implement a bureaucratic nightmare that not only fails to solve the problem but generally makes the situation exponentially worse.

Such is the history of progressive government. Welfare. Poverty. Mortgages. School bussing. Education – at all levels… Failed programs, over and over again. And now we have Obamacare, where a healthcare system that was meeting the needs of 90% of the American population will be transmogrified into something that meets the needs of far fewer, all while imposing financial and regulatory hardships on hundreds of millions of Americans.  

At what point will Americans figure out that these failures do not happen on their own but rather they are the scripted outcome of a Greek tragedy called Liberalism? By now the audience should know the outcome of the story… Big government doesn’t solve problems. It simply takes bad situations and makes them worse. Perhaps the spectacular failure of Obamacare and everything associated with it will be the wakeup call Americans need to see that for all of its beguiling charm and compassionate language, liberalism is nothing more than a siren’s song, promising an island paradise in a sea of human misery. Not only is there no island, nor paradise, but the waters are filled with jagged rocks which invariably destroy every ship whose folly brings it too close.  If we’re lucky Obamacare will be that rare Greek play where the protagonist learns from his mistakes and changes course before his ship is impaled on the rocks…