According to a recent poll, 56 percent of voters in key battleground districts want to repeal “Obamacare.” That includes 49 percent of independents, 23 percent of Democrats and, presumably, key inhabitants of the White House. Why else would the Obama administration have just exempted 30 companies from complying with a law the president promised would allow everyone to keep their health care plan?
OK, I'm joking. Sort of. Obama probably doesn't want to repeal his signature legislative achievement; a one-year waiver would simply delay its impact on those companies' nearly 1 million workers until well after the November elections.
Even so, this week's tragicomic farce probably isn't what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had in mind back in March when she infamously suggested Congress had to “pass the bill so that you can find out what's in it.” She and most of her peers may not have read the bill before foisting it on the rest of us, but business leaders clearly have – and their reaction has not exactly followed the Democrats' we-know-what's-best-for-you party line.
The president and others promised an increasingly mush-minded America that millions of uninsured and even uninsurable people could receive health care coverage without inconveniencing them or further boosting the obscene national debt. And no one was supposed to benefit more than low-income people.
But those are precisely the people most affected by the waivers, which exempt McDonald's, a California agricultural cooperative, a New York teachers union and others from a provision requiring companies to increase the minimum annual benefits for low-cost health plans. Without the waivers, the companies would have had to provide a minimum of $750,000 in coverage this year before increasing to $1.25 million in 2012 and $2 million in 2013.
The Department of Health and Human Services said it approved the waivers so the employers wouldn't drop coverage due to increased costs.
So I guess Obama was right, after all: Those workers will get to keep their health plans – by removing themselves from the very plan that was supposed to safeguard their coverage.
To an ever-dwindling number of Kool-Aid drinkers, all of this simply reflects the fact that the law isn't scheduled to take full effect until 2014, when government-organized markets will offer insurance subsidized by tax credits, and the normal economic laws of supply and demand will somehow magically no longer apply.
But even if that were true, the waivers would more than justify Americans' growing belief that they have been sold a dangerously flawed bill of goods.
The government simply cannot expect insurance companies to increase coverage without also increasing price.
It cannot force McDonald's and other companies to spend 80 percent to 85 percent of their premiums on direct medical benefits, as it is trying to do, without risking a backlash should economic reality differ from bureaucrats' warped vision of the marketplace.
It cannot assure skeptics they will like the bill when they get to know it, then feign shock or anger when the opposite proves true – even though most of the regulations are still to be written.
It cannot legitimately grant waivers to a relative handful of favored or politically connected organizations without extending the same opportunity to everyone.
Perhaps most of all, it cannot make such a calculated political decision without inviting the obvious question: If the law is so beneficial, why is the White House so desperate to minimize, defer or hide its impact?
The truth is that the federal government has avoided the laws of economic physics as long as it has only by running up trillions of dollars in debt. Sooner or later, however, government will be left with the difficult choice of increasing taxes, cutting spending or forcing the increasingly fragile private sector to do its dirty work by imposing new mandates, regulations and costs.
The waiver requests are an inevitable reaction to the latter, most cowardly choice. No wonder the Capitol Hill newspaper's poll (co-sponsored by America's Natural Gas Alliance) of nearly 5,000 likely voters revealed what it did – and why they and millions of other Americans seem eager to subject Washington to a thorough political colonic in November.
And if you're prone to vote only for politicians willing to give you more stuff at the expense of other people or the country's future, do everybody a favor and stay home.
