Shattuk: Could anything be more awful than Obamacare?Saturday February 21, 2015
Tom Shattuk
The frigid winter has gotten even colder for Barack Obama.
President “selfie-stick” just got a snapshot of his troubled Affordable Care Act and it’s starting to resemble an unaffordable debacle.
The latest snafu: Some 800,000 Americans who got their plans on the technologically toxic Healthcare.gov were given incorrect tax forms and will need to “amend” their filings. Don’t worry though, the correct forms are coming ... in March!
Bad news if you’ve already spent your refund. By the way, you’re going to need that refund because anemic enrollment means fewer dollars in the pool and that means premiums will go up, up, up. So much for the “Affordable” Care Act.
Just days after filming a bizarre, celebratory video with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell in which the president lauds robust Obamacare enrollment numbers, the administration has also called for a do-over so that an undisclosed number of Americans can sign up, for real this time, and avoid the tax penalty. They’ll have until April 30th to learn to love Obamacare and fall in line.
“It gives you some sense of how hungry people were out there for affordable, accessible health insurance,” Obama boasted in the short video during a performance worthy of an Oscar nod tomorrow night.
“The Affordable Care Act is working.”
It’s working in much the same way New Coke worked. Not at all.
Sadly, Americans never wanted Obamacare and certainly never asked to be treated this way. For a while they nervously endured it as one might an inappropriate shoulder rub from a sitting vice president. But now they’ve come to the breaking point.
Americans don’t like Obamacare. Never did, never will. Obama can run around with the Buzzfeed hipsters all he wants, vamping from between two ferns, hashtagging along with Pajama Boy, but the ACA is a box-office flop.
Last year they popped the champagne after attaining an enrollment goal which last November they admitted was artificially inflated using dental insurance enrollment numbers. This year, the IRS is ready to levy fines on the unenrolled.
Not even eight feet of New England snow can bury the truth. No one wants to climb aboard the USS Obamacare. But for those already onboard, rough seas await. This capsizing ship is like the Winter of 2015 — too big, too intrusive, too dangerous, too expensive and downright depressing.
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/2015/02/shattuck_could_anything_be_more_awful_than_obamacare
