Obamacare: What Really Happened

Based on his wildly successful campaign alone, one would have to concede that President Obama and his progressive cohorts are skilled political tacticians. It may be less obvious that they are also world-class political strategists.

Take the recently passed Obamacare bill as an example. On many occasions, the President and the Democrat leadership have clearly stated that their primary goal is nationalized health care (also called “single-payer system”, and “socialized medicine”). In fact, nationalized health care was often described as the core provision in the proposed health care reform bills – progressives like Congressman Dennis Kucinich threatened to vote against the bill unless it contained nationalized health care. But, nationalized health care ran into stone walls in Congress, so the progressives dropped the provision, ostensibly because any version of Obamacare was better than none – a seemingly wise tactical move.

The bill that finally passed is more than 2,700 pages long, incredibly complex, and contains many controversial provisions, but it does not contain nationalized health care ... or does it? Doesn’t it seem strange that people as committed and successful as Obama/Pelosi/Reid gave up on their primary goal? In fact, they did no such thing. What they really did was employ a brilliant strategy to slip nationalized health care in under the radar. Here’s how they did it.

We begin with the health care bill’s seemingly innocuous and just provision that insurance companies can no longer deny coverage to anyone because of pre-existing conditions. Who wouldn’t be in favor of that? Even many Republicans support this notion. (Never mind that it flies in the face of all business logic - imagine calling an insurance company to buy coverage for your wrecked car or your house that just burned down.)

The second provision to consider is that everyone will be required to have health insurance – universal participation. Those who refuse to buy health insurance will be fined. Requiring Americans to buy something is of course highly controversial and even unconstitutional in the eyes of many. The Obama camp cleverly responded to these arguments by explaining that universal participation would mean more customers for insurance companies and therefore lower premiums for everyone. They emphasized that approximately half of the currently uninsured people in this country choose not to buy health insurance because they are healthy; and, since Obamacare will require these healthy folks to buy health insurance, the insurance companies will gain more than 10 million new, healthy, and therefore profitable, customers. Seems like a win-win, except of course for the 10 – 15 million reluctant participants who will be forced to buy insurance they don’t want.

Enter the third, and last provision we must consider: to soften the blow for these reluctant participants, the fines for refusing to participate are relatively low. Individuals who refuse to participate will pay an annual fine of $695 or less, and families who refuse will pay a maximum of $2,085. Compare these amounts to conservative estimates of the average annual cost of health insurance: around $4,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a family. The health insurance costs 5 times more than the fines. Obviously, most of the healthy uninsured folks won’t be new insurance company customers after all – financially, they’ll be way better off to pay the fines.

Now, recall the Obamacare provision that insurance companies cannot deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions. This means you can choose to pay the fines at absolutely no risk, because you can always buy the health insurance after you get sick or injured. Holy smoke and mirrors! What if all the other healthy individuals and families – those that are currently insured - choose to do the same thing?

Well, let’s see. Health insurance companies stay in business because the insurance premiums paid by healthy customers exceed the claims made by sick or injured customers. But, under Obamacare, it is financially prudent for healthy people to pay the fines and avoid buying health insurance until after they are sick or injured. So, the only remaining insurance company customers will be the sick or injured. Without the premiums from healthy people to offset the cost of claims, the insurance companies will go broke.

And what will happen then? Why, our benevolent progressive government will bail out the insurance companies and take them over. Presto chango: we have nationalized health care/single-payer/socialized medicine. Wow! Wasn’t that the core goal of President Obama and his progressive friends in the first place – the goal that they ostensibly tactically abandoned?

Now that’s what I call a great strategy. The progressives’ first tactic was to abandon the most controversial provision: nationalized health care. Then by proposing a huge, hopelessly complicated, multi-thousand page plan filled with many controversial provisions, the progressives diverted attention and focused the national debate on many other obviously controversial issues – another really clever tactic that was critical to the success of the overall strategy. Even if the President and the progressives lost a few of the battles over some of these controversial issues, the strategy moved forward because all they really needed was coverage of pre-existing conditions and relatively low fines for not having health insurance coverage. Any other provisions that remained in the bill were pure gravy, because these two provisions alone will inevitably lead to nationalized health care.

Here’s the bottom line. Unless we somehow manage to repeal Obamacare, America will soon have nationalized health care/single-payer system/socialized medicine, and the government will have taken over (nationalized) one of America’s largest industries. We’ve been had by the biggest con in American history.