Whose job will it be to fix ObamaCare? Everyone but Obama, says Obama
If the Supreme Court rules against the Obama Administration in the King v. Burwell case, what they’ll be deciding is that ObamaCare means what it says—and people are only eligible for federal subsidies to their health premiums if they bought the policies on state-run exchanges.
That would pretty well collapse the ground under ObamaCare, since people in the 34 states who were smart enough not to take the bait would now be forced to pay full price for suddenly not-so-affordable health policies. Up to this point, the administration has simply provided the subsidies anyway, in spite of the law’s language, because he’s Barack Obama and he does whatever he wants.
If that is no longer permitted by the Court, one might wonder what the White House would propose to do about it—and members of Congress posed that question to Sylvia Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, as she testified this past week.
Ms. Burwell doesn’t quite seem to grasp the idea that when you screw something up, you’re the one responsible for fixing it. In her testimony, she emphasized that if King v. Burwell doesn’t go the administration’s way, it will be the responsibility of Congress and the states to clean up the resulting mess.
That’s consistent with President Obama’s consistent assertion that the administration has no plan for what to do if the subsidies are struck down—and here’s what it means in practice: They expect Congress to extend the subsidies to those who bought ObamaCare policies on the federal exchange, and they expect the governors of states that did not establish their own exchanges to now do so.
In other words, Obama’s position is that if everyone else had only proceeded as he intended when ObamaCare passed, there would be no problem. He suggested the same thing with regard to the Court last week, claiming that they never should have taken the case in the first place, and that the only thing they can do that he would consider “playing it straight” would be to rule his way.
You’ll notice a pattern here. Governors need to get with it and establish exchanges. Congress needs to get with it and extend subsidies. The Supreme Court needs to stop taking cases Obama doesn’t want them to take. That way, ObamaCare will work the way Obama wants it to!
Life would be so much easier for Obama if he didn’t have to deal with two other co-equal branches of government, and with 50 states, many of whom neither share nor support his socialist agenda.
Then again, life might also be easier for Obama if he would acknowledge that his own signature legislation is bereft with problems—some because of poor design and some because it’s working as designed—and that it’s his responsibility to fix what he inflicted on the nation.
In many ways, this makes Obama the quintessential liberal. So many of their ill-conceived policies are based on their pie-in-the-sky ideas whereby “if only everyone would” (do whatever) then all of society would be grand, and so they try to pass legislation that forces everyone to do whatever liberals think they should do. Then when people don’t want to do that, they are greedy, racists, idiots . . . you name it.
This is Obama’s governing style too. He passes laws that only work if everyone does what Obama thinks they should do. Then when they don’t—which is inevitable—Obama insists the problem isn’t his fault because everyone didn’t do what he thought they should. And nothing is ever his fault, nor is any problem his responsibility to fix.
We don’t just have a liberal president. We have a president who pretty much personifies liberalism, both in word and in deed. And that’s why, if the Supreme Court eviscerates ObamaCare in its upcoming ruling, it will be everyone else’s responsibility to fix it. But never Obama’s.
