The Obamacare Disaster

It’s a Symptom of a Sick Government

Obamacare is a disaster. As you may have heard, over the last few weeks, websites for health insurance exchanges set up by the President’s signature law have been struggling with technical difficulties. Doctors are protesting the law. More than half of all Americans want the new healthcare overturned and repealed.

But it’s more than an economic and political fiasco; Obamacare is a moral failure.

Obamacare, officially called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is nearly 1,000 pages long. Most of our representatives in Washington, including the primary sponsors of the ACA, have been open about the fact that they haven’t read the whole thing. The politicians we elect and send to Washington are meant to be servants of the People. They’re employed by you and me. The laws they write are laws meant to help you and me. Shouldn’t we be able to understand the law, then? If congressmen, many of whom have advanced law degrees, haven’t read and can’t understand the law, why should they expect us to?

Our Constitution, the law upon which all other are based, isn’t 1,000 pages long. It’s four pages long. In fact, when the Founding Fathers held the Constitutional Convention, one of the most important committees they started was the Committee on Style and Reduction. Laws ought to be simple and easy for the American people to understand. How can a law serve our interests if we don’t even understand all of it?

The length of the ACA isn’t bad just because it makes things harder to understand for the average American. The length of Obamacare also allowed Senators and Congressmen to sneakily hide earmarks in the law.

An earmark is an amendment to a law that provides government funding to something that is outside the scope of a law. A Senator or Congressman would be earmarking a law if he added an amendment onto a military spending bill that provided for repaving roads in his home district.

The problem with earmarks is a simple one. Earmarks encourage our representatives to secure funding for special interest groups back home, so those special interest groups will then go out and pressure you and me to vote for the representative that got them their funding. Earmarks are a problem because earmarks encourage the men and women who are meant to be fighting for us to fight for these pressure groups instead.

And, boy, is Obamacare full of earmarks!

Notable examples include a ten billion dollar sweetheart deal for Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a tax exemption engineered exclusively for Michigan by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), special funding for Tennessee (especially in Democratic districts), a 100 million dollar increase in Medicare funding for the state of Nebraska and Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), and a 300 million dollar increase in Medicare funding for Louisiana and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

The halls of the Capitol Building should not be a place for this corrupt wheeling and dealing. Our politicians should be serving the WHOLE People, not just Big Labor and Big Business and the folks that can get them elected.

Washington has become a den of corruption, and you and I should be furious about that. We need to send a message to our politicians. We need to tell them that we’re fed up with the corruption and with the earmarks and the confusion. We need to remind them, and by them I mean all of them, regardless of political stripe, that they are public servants. They all need to understand that our tax dollars aren’t there to help their reelection campaigns.

Obamacare is nothing if not a symbol of the massive corruption and the stunning lack of morality that is apparently gripping Washington DC. If you and I work together to get Congress to repeal Obamacare and if you and I work to throw the corrupt politicians that supported this wretched law out of the Nation’s Capital, perhaps we can bring at least some modicum of virtue back to our country’s politics.