A Fox News Channel commentator cleverly selected a golf reference to describe the impact of President Donald Trump’s October 12 executive order on a law bearing a famously disingenuous name, the Affordable Care Act. Harris Faulkner said Trump’s order will “take a divot” out of the law, a.k.a., Obamacare.
To carry that a bit further, it is one of those big, sloppy divots off of a drenched fairway that splatters one’s golf togs on precisely the day white slacks seemed a good fashion call. Obamacare, as time has proven, is not a pristine, sun-drenched Pinehurst No. 2 during a U.S. Open. It is a beaten up municipal course with poor drainage and a neglectful maintenance crew.
Of course, the mainstream media is not playing along. Based on it’s frenzied reaction, Trump has not moved a little dirt. He has fired up the Presidential bulldozer. Despite countless examples of how Obamacare provisions continue to unravel, the MSM narrative is unwavering. Obamacare gave Americans health care. Period. Any talk of revising or improving Obama legacy’s legislation is a veiled attempt, contend the media, to take away, to deny coverage to which all have a birthright.
Before Trump had applied pen to paper, Democrats and the media (the most redundant phrase in Washington) expressed public outrage, which is difficult to square up with an order that “directs federal agencies to take actions aimed at providing lower-cost (medical insurance) options and fostering competition in the individual insurance markets,” reported The Wall Street Journal.
Lower costs? Competition? This insanity must be stopped, crowed the political left’s elites.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who typically prefers to read legal documents after commenting on them — “we have to pass (Obamacare) so we can find out what’s in it” — said she had not seen Trump’s executive order but nevertheless went on to say it is nothing more than a scheme to “sabotage the Affordable Care Act” and represents a “real disservice to the American people.” Presumably, Pelosi is referring to the very same people who have been served by skyrocketing Obamacare premiums and the steady exit of insurers even willing to so much as offer coverage.
A study earlier this year makes clear that the saboteurs do not occupy the White House. The Obamacare nightmare scenario is worth a read. Much of the blame for skittish insurance companies is placed at the feet of Republicans for failure to pass a repeal-and-replace measure, but of course no mention is made that Democrats were complicit in assuring the failure, unwilling to even discuss ways to improve Obamacare.
The ink was not dry on Trump’s EO when The New York Times posted a report reviewing the 11 ways in which Trump’s administration is “undermining Obamacare”. Of course, these are the same dishonest so-called journalists who are uncomfortable with the way Trump and Republicans are “undermining” the sluggish economic growth that defined the Obama era.
Absurd as it is, the Times kicks off its list by lamenting that the October 12 order opens the door to giving Americans the option of buying less expensive plans (instead of plans they were forced to buy but can’t afford to use) with fewer benefits (such as, oh, contraception for 50-something males) and fewer protections (because only the federal nanny state knows which protections people need).
The Times also lists as an undermining act by the Trump White House that it had the audacity to produce videos “criticizing the health law” and, worse, to go ahead and post said videos on YouTube. What if an intelligent citizen actually watches a video and realizes that Obamacare is imploding by the hour? Why, he might run to his Prius and peel away a fraying Obama 2012 bumper sticker in shame!
Difficult as it might be to be to understand how Democrats object to lower costs and more options (including the flexibility to allow small businesses to create insurance pools) while seeing no red flags as premiums and deductibles skyrocket, there is an obvious explanation. They’ll never drive the United States toward a federally run, single-payer system if insurers are finally forced to compete for the pools of uninsured.
And how is single-payer utopia working out elsewhere? The Telegraph newspaper of the United Kingdom published this headline last July: One million patients a week cannot get a (general practitioner) appointment. Reports The Telegraph:
This amounts to around 47 million occasions on which patients attempted but failed to secure help from their GP, forcing them to give up, try again later or turn to Accident & Emergency departments.
Keep the divots coming, President Trump.