The Democrats Now Own Obamacare
I hope they enjoy the victory tweets and self-congratulatory retorts on MSNBC…
In a couple of years this "win" will make the Persian "triumph" in the battle of Thermoplyae look like a minor setback.
Roberts got Obamacare off on a technicality and turned it into a tax collection/IRS issue. All the happy talk about pre-existing condition coverage will fade. Now the question will be: Who voted to raise taxes on the middle class? On medical device companies? On the dividends of retirees? All for something that Congress does not have power to require people to buy? Are you serious?
When premiums rise, costs explode, government hands out Solyndra-like contracts on the one hand while cutting Medicare benefits on the other, when new treatments are denied and things go wrong it's the Democrats that people will blame.
Democrats will seek to shift the discussion by claiming Romney is the intellectual godfather of Obamacare.
Not even close.
True, Romney had a (small) penalty tied to a real mandate (not a mandate posing as a tax pretending to be penalty). He didn't raise taxes. He took Medicaid money and state funds to extend Medicaid to cover low income people that did not have or could not afford insurance and required them to pay part of the cost of premiums and health care. That's something forbidden under Obamacare. There were no boards to ration or control what technologies or treatments doctors used or patients could have.
In any event, when premiums rise, costs explode, government hands out Solyndra-like contracts on the one hand while cutting Medicare benefits on the other, when new treatments are denied and things go wrong, it's the Democrats that people will blame.
Regardless of whether the president is re-elected or not or whether Republicans gain control of the Senate and hold on to the House, the Democrats and the interest groups that pushed so hard for government expansion of healthcare will and should be held responsible for the taxes, the premiums, and the implementation.
Editor's Note: We have reprinted the full text of Robert M. Goldberg's post "The Democrats Now Own Obamacare" from the American Spectator's Spectacle Blog. We encourage you to visit the original.

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