Cynical

Four years ago this month, as Barack Obama and congressional Democrats began the long hyperpartisan slog that eventually resulted in Obamacare, I wrote:

It’s as if Boeing Aircraft designed a new airplane seating two thousand people, but decided that a six-month engineering effort was all that was required and no prototyping or testing was necessary. “Load the plane up and let’s fly her. After all, we need to go to market with this sucker.” Most observers would call that line of thinking irresponsible.

The health care legislation that the President is suggesting will carry 300 million people, and he is, in essence, suggesting “Load it up and let’s fly her.” No real engineering, no prototyping, no testing, no time for detailed analysis of consequences.

Irresponsible.

Just this week, in a cynical political move that has become the hallmark of the Obama administration, major elements of the ACA (Obamacare) have been postponed until after the mid-term elections.

The Wall Street Journal comments:

But all of a sudden on Tuesday evening Mark Mazur—you know him as the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy—published a blog post canceling the insurance reporting rules and tax enforcement until 2015 as Washington began to evacuate for the long Independence Day weekend. Enjoy the holiday, mate.

White House fixer Valerie Jarrett tried to contain the fallout with a separate blog post promising that ObamaCare is otherwise "staying the course." That's true only if she's referring to the carelessness and improvisation that have defined the law so far.

The ACA—as Democratic Senator Max Baucus tells us today, and those of us who opposed the ACA from the beginning argued years ago—is an unmitigated “train wreck.” As a consequence of a massive big government intrusion into the private sector, businesses will layoff workers or will redefine full-time to part time jobs or will dumb-down the insurance coverage that currently exists. At the same time insurance rates will rise (in some case dramatically) and as 30 million uninsured people enter the system, the quality of care will be stressed to the breaking point.

Charles Krauthammer observes:

Cynicism is always the right assumption when dealing with this administration ... Look, in the end the bill [ACA] is a massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old.

Young people are going to be paying double and triple what [they] would ordinarily be paying in health insurance if the premium were linked to the risk, which is the way that would be for the last 600 years in insurance. But it's not; it's linked to what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid agreed upon as the risk ratio. So they are going to be doubling and tripling, and the free lunch part of this affair is now over.

Because all of the negative effects of the ACA—higher costs, coerced coverage, economic dislocation for more than a few workers, to name just a few—were about to begin before mid-term election, it seemed best to delay the pain. That's not only cynical, it also dishonest. But why should that surprise anyone.