Gina Loudon:
For the first time in years, the message of free enterprise is penetrating the veil of the American electorate.
The Obama administration has done all it can do to promote Obamacare to the American public, but it isn’t buying it. The establishment GOP has done its usual whining and blaming, but somehow it is winning. Why?
Every conservative outlet will try to take credit, and some of the credit does rightfully go to these outlets that have been refining the message for years now.
But conservative outlets have been refining the message for years now. The problem traditionally has been that, however strong the message, it usually doesn’t resonate with an American public, which likes entertainment news better than hard news and would rather think about sports teams than partisan politics.
This time it is resonating. The public has turned against Obamacare. In a recent CBS poll, 54 percent of Americans don’t like Obamacare, and 39 percent want it repealed. Only 3 percent of federal workers even want to partake in Obamacare. That isn’t winning.
This reality makes as little sense to me as the premise that a program that “covers more people” and “is better than the current system” will magically cost less. But folks who like small government, free enterprise and liberty better take a close look at what we did right so we can learn from it, because, frankly, we aren’t used to winning.
We should be winning. We are a good, solid 50 percent plus of society and we are smarter, per capita, than those who are willing to be controlled by a tyrannical overreach of a bureaucracy who deems them “useful idiots,” but we don’t sync our message enough – except this time.
The original “Affordable Healthcare Act” was 2,000 pages that no one read until it passed. It has delivered $6.2 trillion in new debt, 20 new taxes and 20,000 new pages of HHS rules, such as mandatory breastfeeding counseling and mammograms that single 20-year-old men will have to pay for, and they know that. Health-care costs are multiplying while jobs are disappearing because companies with more than 50 employees are mandated to cover them so businesses simply aren’t expanding. Since part-time employees are exempt, companies are cutting hours and this is costing the middle class. All of this was long expected by free-market types. The amazing part is that the public is catching on now, too.
Seniors are upset because Obamacare threatens Medicare, and according to Heritage, their out-of-pocket costs will explode.
Unions are upset because the 40-hour work week is becoming a thing of the past since Obamacare fines those who have more than 50 full-time employees who don’t comply. So far, about 50 percent of businesses plan to cut their full-time workers down to part time, and about 40 percent will simply freeze hiring to comply according to a chamber of commerce study.
Families are upset because they were looking forward to all the money they were supposed to save.
The president said that the average American family can expect a $2,500 savings from Obamacare, but the WSJ said families can actually expect double or triple costs in addition to less jobs and more taxes.
But none of that matters much to the survival of Obamacare. Young, healthy people matter. They matter because if they don’t opt in and pay, the program will collapse. Physics and economics dictate that without those young, healthy people in the program, the older, sicker people will sink the ship.
That is why the Obama administration has enlisted Hollywood, schoolchildren and others to help them sell the precarious program. California schools are receiving grant money to train students how to teach their parents to enroll in Obamacare.
