Who Needs a Re-Education?

“We have a lot of Re-education to do,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said this week. And no wonder — once you’ve started with Rationing and Redistribution, it’s the third R of out-of-control government!

Sebelius claims senior citizens need the re-education the most, because they “have been a target of a lot of the misinformation.” Of course, what’s really happened is that Americans have learned more about Obama’s law, and what they’ve learned, they don’t like. The facts are now inescapable, for Sebelius and for the politicians who advocated for this measure — facts that detail the false nature of the case advanced by the president and his allies, and the true ramifications of this wrongheaded reform package foisted upon the American people. They’ve learned that they can’t keep their plan, even if they like it; they can’t count on lower costs; they can’t count on lower deficits; and they can count on more bureaucracy, more rationing, and more IRS involvement in your daily life.

Today, fewer than one-in-three Americans believe their family will be better off under ObamaCare. The same survey Nancy Pelosi touted last month as showing some positive views on the measure illustrates the movement. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that “support for health reform fell over the course of August, dipping from a 50 percent favorability rating in July to 43 percent, while 45 percent of the public reported unfavorable views.”

Americans have these views because of the litany of broken promises within Obamacare, detailed across thousands of websites, hundreds of reports and dozens of research papers released since its passage. They have these views not because they need to be taught a lesson by Kathleen Sebelius, but because they’ve noticed how the politicians and activists with all those big promises are awfully quiet now. They can’t even make the claim that the legislation will reduce costs or lower the deficit any more without getting laughed out of the room.

Maybe these politicians would’ve been better off if they’d read the bill in the first place. But not even Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), one of the leaders in the push for passage, had time to do that.

So who is it that needs a re-education? Not the American people, but the political leadership itself — a lesson that will likely come at the ballot box.

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