The ACA: We Were Warned

Extending tax cuts on the so-called Affordable Care Act. It is one of the larger arguments hiding behind the Federal Government shutdown. Milton Friedman famously said that we can have free immigration or a welfare state, but you cannot have both. What we are seeing now, in the shutdown, is the dancing around the consequences of trying to have both. However, it is also something much larger and more ominous.  
 
Let me first point you to Victoria Taft’s excellent piece on the subject of free healthcare for illegals in California, for a deep dive on the scams California is running under the ACA. Then, with that as a basis, come back here so we can finish the discussion. It’s worth it, I promise you.
 
You’re back? 

Good.

Victoria focuses on California, and that’s fine for the purposes of revealing the fraud. But they’re not the only state doing things similarly, So it also meshes nicely with what the Democrats were pushing back when the ACA was just a bill.

I suggest that the scam that Victoria so ably describes would simply not be possible absent the ACA and the tax credits supporting it. The Democrats are now desperate to save their larger plan that was put into place under Barack Obama.

Keeping Friedman’s admonition about our inability to have both a welfare state and open borders in mind, it’s obvious the continuing need for the subsidies was always baked into the cake.

This is going to get tangled, so stay with me, please.
 
It’s no accident that the ACA was put into play before the influx of illegals under Obama. Remember, while the Obama administration was trying to get the ACA pushed through Congress and past the courts, including the United States Supreme Court, it was simultaneously working on legislation granting amnesty to 15 to 30 million illegals already in the country at that point. (I remind you, this was 2010, long before the even larger influx of illegals under Biden).

It took time for the water to boil down to where we could see the Democrats’ real concern hiding under the water, but we’re there now. Politico, on Friday of this week, reported:

 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out a new Democratic counterproposal for ending the government shutdown: attaching a one-year extension of soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies to a spending stopgap that would reopen agencies.

Schumer outlined the proposal during a floor speech Friday that was heavily attended by other Democratic senators in a show of caucus unity.

“We would like to offer a simple proposal that would reopen the government and extend the ACA premium tax credits simultaneously,” Schumer said.

Schumer proposed a “clean” one-year extension to the tax credits that expire on Dec. 31 — meaning they would not include new restrictions on eligibility that many Republicans have sought. He also proposed creating a bipartisan committee to negotiate a longer-term solution for the subsidies and other health care reforms, to begin its work after the government reopens.

So essentially, this shutdown fight has always been about keeping this ACA scam in place.

The American people are seeing that the ACA has been anything but affordable. Healthcare prices are higher now than they were before the ACA, and have been going up at a faster rate than they were before the ACA, and even faster than the price of everything else. And that's without the illegals being added to the mix. They're now asking, "If it is such a great plan, why does it need to be subsidized?"

In the end, the Democrats shut the government down and kept it there because they’ve been trying to keep the subsidies for the ACA going, and thereby keeping out of the spotlight the idea that the ACA was a monumentally costly failure. At least for the stated purpose. What is the purpose? Nearly permanent political power for the Democrats. That conclusion is now inescapable. 

And it’s not as if we weren’t warned. Indeed, I myself smelled the death surrounding the ACA back in 2010:

So what do we have here, in total?

We have a bill (The ACA) that took massive amounts of corruption, and quid pro quo, to get passed.  The fact is there was more corruption in the writing and passing of this bill and then what the Democrats have offered as heretofore, which is of course is saying something.

We have less health care, fewer doctors, longer wait times, all of these points in ample evidence in every situation where government driven health care has taken over. The history of the thing should have been alarming enough to cause the vast majority of Americans to reject the bill. (Oh, wait… they did that. Never mind).

We have more government bureaucracy, including a large expansion of the IRS, a debt load that makes our debt heretofore seem minuscule by comparison, and an inability to react a global military situations as they arise, even within our own borders.

It remains to be seen whether not the American people will react appropriately to this breach of trust … (after all the vast majority of Americans, even the majority of Democrats wanted nothing to do with this bill ) … but the bottom line is that if that support mattered, the Democrats would not pursue this course in the first place.

 They now have socialism built into our Healthcare system.  Even assuming a large turnover to the Republicans come November the chances of overturning this monstrosity seem small it best.

At least, in terms of Congress itself overturning it. The next act in this tragedy is going to play out in the midterm elections and in the courts.

At the time, W. C. Varones shared that dire prediction, and suggested, as regards the already huge number of illegals involved in that amnesty plan Obama was pushing:

Assuming 90% of them would instantly become life-long loyal Democrat voters (And why wouldn't they? They've just been given US citizenship and US Health Care by a Democrat), any massive "backlash" against the Democrats that appears to be developing right now will really only end up likely being more than countered by the massive increase in the total number of loyal Democrat voters that Amnesty will provide.
 
I hope I'm wrong. Of course, I do not know if Amnesty would mean they could instantly register to vote for the November 2010 elections (2012 almost certainly), or if some other steps would be required by the legislation. But to me, it looks like this is the reason that the Democrats feel absolutely no need to listen to the wishes of the majority of the electorate right now. Simply put; they are not legislating for this current electorate. They are legislating for the electorate-to-come, the one that will exist after Amnesty is granted to 15-30 million new Democrat voters. 

Here’s the kicker:

This is very deliberate. And the sequence of Obama's major Agenda items was designed to bring this mega-majority about. The Stimulus bill had to be first, because it feathers the financial bed for Democrats' re-election campaigns. Then Health Care had to be next, because if they granted Amnesty first, then the Health Care proposal would appear much more expensive than the bill makes it appear right now (without the 15-30 million new citizens).

(Shrug.) It’s worked out only slightly differently. They (and the huge numbers who stumbled over our borders under Biden) are not citizens as yet. But we have all seen the evidence of their votes being cast and financial benefits received, despite the illegality involved.

Go ahead and tell me about how all this is not fitting together like a puzzle designed to be easy for six-year-olds.

My friend Billy Beck wrote at the time that America was being legislated out of existence. I thought that a bit harsh at the time. The situation described here meshing so neatly with the Democrats' dogged determination to keep the government shutdown going until the continuance of that gravy train is guaranteed makes me consider once again that Billy wasn’t so far off the mark, after all.

I have said for years that the only real solution to healthcare costs going up, as they have since 1965 and LBJ’s “Great Society” and its Medicaid, is to remove government from healthcare altogether. Remember, please, that the "Great Society" was the pivot point for healthcare costs, which have far outstripped the cost increases of everything else since that time. 

Trouble is, were we to do that, the plan of the Democrats as discussed above would fall apart completely. This explains the desperation that the Democrats are showing us today as they try to maintain the subsidies, and in turn is why our government is still shut down.

Obama's recent and apparently sudden and overt lean toward socialism, which Matt Margolis well documented, is now revealed as not so new or sudden at all. With all I've shown here, it is clear that the Democrats, or whoever is pulling their strings, are playing the long game. That said, Matt is spot on in a later piece, when he says the Republicans Must Hold The Line. Correct in ways many are now just coming to grips with.