Supercilious Sebelius and the End of Western Civilization‏ pb

“OVERSEER OF DESTRUCTION”

by Don Fredrick, blogging at The Obama Timeline

(Oct. 13, 2013) — On October 7, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen “no fetus left alive” Sebelius appeared on The Daily Show. Host Jon Stewart, despite being a leftist who prefers a single payer health care system (otherwise known as socialism) to a free market solution to the nation’s health care woes, nevertheless did a respectable job of ridiculing both Sebelius and the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare via its wretched website, Healthcare.gov. (Stewart may want to replace stupid and evil with pure evil, but at least he recognizes stupid when he sees it.)

Few viewers—especially the “millennials” who make up the vast majority of Stewart’s audience—noticed that the supercilious Sebelius also got in a dig with which she ridiculed every conservative and Libertarian in the nation (as well as some common-sense Democrats who still have a partial understanding of capitalism and recognize the advantages of a free market over socialism or market-controlling fascism). Sebelius said sarcastically, “As you know, we’re facing the end of western civilization by having a market-based strategy. We are bringing western civilization to its knees by selling private insurance plans on a website where people can pick and choose.”

Sebelius was mockingly and contemptuously suggesting that conservatives should be happy with ObamaCare “because the exchanges are market-based.” That is mistaken. (Actually, it is a bald-faced lie.) The exchanges have nothing to do with free markets. In a free market, insurers are free to sell whatever policies they wish to sell and consumers are free to buy (or not buy) whatever policies they choose to buy. But under ObamaCare, insurers can sell only those policies which the government approves; all uninsured Americans are forced to buy insurance whether they want or need it; and federal tax subsidies for the purchase of insurance apply only to those Americans who buy it via the government exchanges. Thus, the federal exchange provides unfair, government-subsidized, and forced competition—in an orchestrated effort to put out of business those private insurers that choose not to deal with the exchanges and are therefore unable to sell policies with prices that are subsidized by the taxpayers. If the ObamaCare scheme were put in place by a private company, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice would be going after it with a vengeance for trying to establish a monopoly.

If the lunacy and unfairness of ObamaCare are not obvious, that may be because the issue has been so sensationalized and misrepresented by the mainstream media that what should be clear has been obscured by the reporting. But the issue is not that complicated. ObamaCare can be shown to be both impractical and the antithesis of everything America stands for—and Sebelius can be shown to be a shameless liar—simply by describing the “Affordable Care Act” in a slightly different way.

Assume for a moment that, instead of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, the Obama administration rammed through Affordable Car Act legislation that sets up “ObamaCar”—a system through which one must buy an automobile, rather than health insurance, on a federal “exchange.”

Here is how it would work:

If you do not already have a car, you must buy one by January 1, 2014—even if you do not have a driver’s license, do not know how to drive, do not want to learn how to drive, and have no desire or need to buy a car. (In fact, if you are blind you must still buy a car.)

If you refuse to buy a car, the IRS will penalize you with a tax that is equivalent to one percent of your income. (For example, the tax would be $400 per year if your annual income is $40,000.) In 2016 the tax increases to 2.5 percent ($1,000 on an annual income of $40,000).

To avoid the penalty, you must not only buy a new car, you must buy it from the government. (If you buy a car from a non-participating car dealer, you must still pay the tax penalty!)

If you have a job and a company car, you are temporarily off the hook and will not be forced to buy a car. But your employer will probably start charging you more for the privilege of having that company car, because ObamaCar demands that the employer provide you with a larger and more expensive car. At some point your employer may simply stop providing you with a company car. When that happens, you will be forced to buy a government car.

If you work full-time but you do not have a company car, your employer will be forced to provide you with one. But because your employer likely cannot afford to buy you (and every one of your co-workers) a car, you may be told you are permitted to work only part-time. You will then not only not be getting a company car, your reduced hours will leave you with reduced income—out of which you will have to buy a government car.

In order to buy a government car, you must use the government’s new car website—a website which does not work properly and was programmed by overpaid incompetents in another country.

If you do manage to gain access to the government’s new vehicle website, YouGoCar.gov, you will find only a limited selection of automobiles. For the most part, the government cars do not meet your needs. You have limited color choices; the government cars come only in bronze, silver, gold, and platinum—and you can probably only barely afford to buy one in the ugly-but-cheaper bronze color. You must pay for expensive four-wheel drive, even if you live where you have no need for four-wheel drive. You cannot order a sun roof, but you must pay for an expensive rear-view video camera. You must pay for two child seats, even if you have no children and do not plan on having children. You are not allowed a test drive. There is no new-car warranty, and you cannot return the vehicle if it is a lemon. You cannot sue the government if you are sold a defective product. The vehicle has not been safety-tested.

If you are young and healthy, you will be charged far more—about 260 percent more—than the vehicle’s sticker price. If you are old and senile and have no business driving, you will nevertheless be offered a new car—at a discount (with the difference in price paid for by the over-charged younger drivers). If you are low-income or poor and cannot afford a car, you will be given one at a reduced price or free of charge. (It will be paid for via higher taxes on everyone who is not poor.) If you are not low-income you can get the reduced price by lying on the website and claiming you are low-income. If you do not speak English you can access a foreign language website, conveniently provided for illegal immigrants who lack both cars and drivers’ licenses. (You will be given a car at no charge.)

If you cannot find a car on the government website for the price you are willing to pay, you may be able to find one at the local automobile dealer. Of course, if you choose to buy it there, you will still have to pay the annual tax penalty for not having bought a government vehicle. But you had better buy that car quickly, because in a few years all the independent car dealers—except the government’s website—will have been driven out of business. You will still be able to buy a government car, but the government car prices will spiral upward from year to year. Additionally, as time passes, fewer options and colors will be available. Eventually, all Americans will be driving the exact same vehicle—except for those who are walking and riding bicycles, while watching the cars they paid for via taxes drive by.

At this point you have figured out that, contrary to what Czar Sebelius suggests, ObamaCare—like ObamaCar—has nothing to do with a free market or capitalism. It is a malevolent mixture of fascism and socialism trying to drive capitalism off the face of the earth. Not only should Sebelius be fired, as her (by now former) friend Senator Pat Roberts of her home state of Kansas has suggested, but Obama should be impeached for having chosen such an incompetent, dishonest, smug advocate of tyranny to oversee the destruction of one-sixth of the American economy.