Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, dropped a bomb on ObamaCare Wednesday. He admitted there are “some serious blemishes right now, and serious deficiencies,” and then conceded, “the reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for an increasing number of people.”
In an ominous sign of things to come, if Democrats are able to keep ObamaCare on life support after the 2016 election, Dayton added: “We’re going to need both state and federal governments to step in and do what they need to do to remedy those problems.”
Translation: get ready for the biggest taxpayer raid in history!
TwinCities.com notes that Minnesota officials recently announced premium increases of 50 to 67 percent, among the worst in the nation. Vastly increased tax subsidies will be demanded to cover those increases, since so many middle-class families don’t currently qualify for them.
As with other markets, providers have been abandoning the marketplace, leaving customers with exactly the kind of reduced choices Barack Obama swore they would never have to face. After Blue Cross/Blue Shield lumbered away from ObamaCare, other nervous providers were convinced to remain, “but most of them are capping the number of customers they will accept.”
The employer-provided insurance market is working much better… but then, it was working quite well before the Democrats launched their trillion-dollar boondoggle.
“I guess it’s better late than never, but Minnesota Republicans pointed out these flaws and tried to pass amendments to the legislation when Democrats under single party rule first passed it without a single Republican vote,” Minnesota Republican Party chairman Keith Downey remarked, filling the “Republicans pounce” angle the media requires for all Democrat disaster stories.
For the record, Downey is absolutely right—Republicans did accurately predict the ObamaCare meltdown in Minnesota, warning about premium hikes, canceled plans, and reduced choices years ago, while Dayton was gushing about how he thought the state program had “performed phenomenally well” after a rocky start. (And by “rocky start,” we’re talking about a four-alarm fire of incompetence and corruption that had auditors flabbergasted that so much money could be spent on a completely non-functional website.)
Naturally, Democrats are blaming ObamaCare’s failure on Republicans, at both the state and national levels. “The governor wants to make it clear that the Republicans in Congress are to blame for their unwillingness to make improvements necessary to make the Affordable Care Act more successful,” spokesman Sam Fettig told Politico in an email.
Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund said it was “nice to finally see some Democrats publicly admit what we’ve been saying for years now: despite promises to the contrary, Obamacare is hurting the bottom line of families across America”:
While running for president, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said she would defend and expand Obamacare, despite her husband’s comments just last week that Obamacare is a ‘crazy system’ that harms the middle class. Now the Democrat Governor of Minnesota has joined conservatives in declaring ‘the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people.’
While members of her own family and her political party are finally admitting the truth about Obamacare, Hillary Clinton continues to march in lockstep with liberal orthodoxy against families who are struggling to make ends meet in the failed Obama economy.
It’s time for a change, and Donald Trump will help usher in that change when he and a Republican Congress repeal Obamacare.
If Hillary Clinton wins the election, there won’t be any “nice” admissions of failure coming. The American people will be forced to pay for the Democrats’ lies and miscalculations, and the bill will be astronomical.
Republicans won’t be congratulated for their foresight in predicting all this—they’ll be told they have a moral imperative to submit and sign off on the bailouts needed to keep the system floating, or stand aside and let the people who saddled us with ObamaCare impose the even greater, endless nightmare of single-payer socialized medicine. Democrats will take zero responsibility for pummeling hard-working families with skyrocketing insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses—they’ll weaponize those burdens against the GOP, portraying all who resist their demands as heartless monsters who don’t want to give working moms a break.
ObamaCare’s victims have been absolutely invisible to the media, able to do little beyond posting their tales of woe in blog talkbacks and social media… but when it’s time for the great Democrat crusade to “fix” the problem they created, you had better believe the individual anecdotes of downtrodden folks who can’t afford decent health care will return with a vengeance. They’ll all be repeating Democrat talking points about “strengthening” ObamaCare.
This is how Democrat programs always work. They’re very good at spending huge amounts of public money to create problems, and then claiming only an even bigger government can solve them. ObamaCare’s collapse shouldn’t have been allowed to occur so quietly during the presidential race to date, and in the remaining weeks, it should not be critiqued as an isolated debacle—it’s the perfect model of what Democrat “governance” means in practice, from broken promises to weaponized failures.
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