EDITORIAL: OBAMACARE: The Cure May Be Worse Than the Disease
Nobody wants a struggling family to not have decent health insurance these days.
To their credit, many hospitals, some in this very area, give away thousands of hours
of pro-bono care for those who have difficulty paying for basic health care for their families.
However, no one will be helped very much if we devise a system that tries to do too much, too soon--especially in a recession. How the Democrats in Washington ever thought that now was a good time to pass a bill as ambitious as this one is beyond belief. With the Iraq War, then the stimulus spending, the price for overhauling the nation's health care delivery system seems like a bad joke.
16,000 new IRS agents being hired to enforce whether each of us has sufficient insurance is just one tell-tale sign that we're in for a strange ride these next few years. And woe (and fines) to those who try to get out from under a health insurance plan.
If the Democrats had really wanted to help more people get health insurance coverage, why couldn't they have moved in a more manageable way. They could have easily devised a plan that gave an additional 12 million Americans coverage, while cutting costs with tort reform. Then, if we were able to stomach the costs for that portion of reform, the American people would have likely trusted them with another stage of reform a few years later.
But this bill wasn't primarily about helping Americans. Rather, this was all about Barack Obama and his need to be a "historic" President. Well, this is historic alright. But whether it's a historic success or failure is still an open question.
What is not in doubt is that Congressman Nick Joe Rahall is going to need every bit of his charm to overcome the distrust many West Virginians in both parties now have for all those who voted for Obamacare. Why Rahall would throw himself on the grenade for Obama remains a great mystery.