The Endless Supply of Obamachumps

by Steven Hayward in Obamacare
A couple weeks back I highlighted the story of Bruce Barcott, the freelance lefty journalist is who is furious that his health insurance plan that he liked was cancelled and his costs going up. He was “seething at the President I helped elect.” Barcott may be seething at President Obama, but Barcott is still willing to swallow the Kool Aid nonetheless, as he pledges his troth to making Obamacare work:

We’re willing to suck it up and pay our fair share for health insurance. We want the exchanges to work. We’re not demanding a last-minute reprieve that threatens the stability of the entire system. What we’re asking for is clarity and competence.

Today Margaret Talbot tells a similar story in The New Yorker in “My Cancelled Policy and My Values.” Sure enough, she’s having to to pay more for coverage she doesn’t need or want. But guess which noun in the headline is going to win out? Hey, it’s The New Yorker, so this isn’t hard:

So yes, I’ll subsidize someone else’s prenatal coverage, in a more effective way than I’ve been doing by default under the current system, in which too many pregnant women show up in emergency rooms without having had such care, creating problems for themselves and their babies, and all sorts of costs for taxpayers. And I’ll remember to be relieved that my own access to health care is guaranteed. But they had better work out the problems with the A.C.A.; if they don’t, and it doesn’t fulfill its promise of insuring the uninsured, I’m really going to feel like a chump.

Memo to journalists like Barcott and Talbot: As Margaret Thatcher once said of Soviet economic performance, it is the system itself that is the problem. Likewise Obamacare itself is the problem: this kind of centralized, standardized, one-size-fits-all cloak for redistribution is going to continue to make chumps of us all. The main difference here is that liberals want to be chumps.

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/12/the-endless-supply-of-obamachumps.php