Obamacare’s Last Stand Or Freedom’s Final Days?

by Ben Crystal 
By the time you read this, the countdown will have passed T-minus four days and counting. If those stalwart stewards of the public trust — your Congress and mine — can’t figure out a way to close the gap between the Democrats and the overwhelming majority of Americans, then the government will close for business at midnight on Sept. 30. The sticking point — beyond the usual partisan chest-thumping that passes for Congressional debate these days — is the same as it has been since President Barack Obama snuck Obamacare through the side door: We the People like Obamacare about as much as Tokyo liked Godzilla.
Despite the enormous unpopularity that has attached itself to the unprecedented expansion of government control over taxpayers’ lives, the Democrats have drawn their line in the dust. They would rather turn off the lights in Washington, D.C., than consider compromising over a bureaucratic monstrosity about which they’ve been lying since it crawled out of former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s fevered brain close to 20 years ago.

And the problem isn’t a simple matter of perspective twisted by partisanship. While the Democrats whine about conservative intransigence, they very carefully ignore the reasons well more than half the country has joined people like Senator Ted Cruz in playing Horatio at the bridge against Obamacare’s Etruscan army. From time to time, John and Jane Q. Public get tired of being treated like marks in an elaborate con. And Obamacare is the biggest con in human history.
The savings Obama promised do not exist. In fact, they are replaced by shocking cost increases that surprised even some of Obamacare’s most vocal critics. Obama promised Obamacare would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.” According to Congressional numbers, individual premiums will rise by a minimum of 8 percent (Rhode Island) up to a maximum of 106 percent (Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Missouri and Ohio). Even a Common Core victim knows that math is bad.
Obama promised we’d be able to keep our coverage if we liked it. Yet Personal Liberty Digest™ doesn’t have the bandwidth to recount the tales of every taxpayer who has received the dreaded coverage cancellation notice from his insurance company. And millions more people have found themselves reduced to part-time status or even pink-slip status, thanks to the squeeze Obamacare has clamped onto their companies.
Obamacare is a scam from start to finish. It’s a penalty; no, it’s a tax. If you like your coverage, you can keep it — or maybe not, especially if you lose your job entirely. Even the death panels are real, albeit poorly hidden behind a smooth-sided pseudonym like “Independent Payment Advisory Board.” And that’s the kind of government we can expect in the future should the Democrats manage to get Obamacare in the barn before the Republicans close the door. If the conservatives in the House can’t put a halt to a law that is already stripping millions of Americans of the quality healthcare of their choice, we’ll have given up a major bridgehead between the America envisioned by the Framers and the America envisioned by Saul Alinsky. 


As the proverbial clock winds its way toward midnight, Obama and his fellow Obamacare grifters are desperately trying to make enough noise to distract us from the same questions they’ve been ignoring from Obamacare’s infancy. If Obamacare is such a boon, why has Obama lied about its particulars? If Obamacare is such a miracle, why did Congress exempt itself; and why have so many of Obama’s cronies begged for similar get-out-of-Obamacare-free cards? House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi infamously cracked: “[B]ut we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” If Obamacare is the key to a paradise of government-provided healthcare, shouldn’t its proponents — like the self-exempted Pelosi — be shouting its praises across the rooftops?
As I write this, Senator Ted Cruz has entered the 20^th hour of his brave stand against a steaming pile of bureaucratic babble with which its own creators want nothing to do. He has assembled some allies, notably Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). The burning question: Shouldn’t every member of Congress who still believes that public service requires serving the public be lined up with him?