[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/06/pelosi.jpg)Nancy Pelosi, Democratic congresswoman and House Minority Leader, has published a 78-page “toolkit” to help supporters of Obamacare sell the law to the public. Colleagues and fellow travelers are exhorted to focus especially on the elderly, young people and women.
Maybe they should focus especially on… Democrats. It is the rank and file of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International and the SEIU United Healthcare Workers of New York who are getting murdered by the real-world effects of the law, losing plans that were working before and petitioning for redress (and in the case of the not-so right-wing Roofers, outright repeal of the law).
The fact is that the more that people, including Democrats, learn about the law, the less they like it. Many sincere citizens thought they were just doing the right thing by their fellow man, especially the poor, by supporting universal healthcare, and they assumed there would be no cost to themselves, as promised by Obama. But they are waking up to the fact that Medicaid is the model for Obamacare, that Medicaid has been exposed as statistically no more beneficial than no insurance at all, and that everyone, themselves included, is now to be herded into a Medicaid-type plan designed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and enforced via increasingly frequent encounters with that most beloved and trusted of agencies, the IRS. Seeing what is coming, alarmed citizens are having second thoughts; Democratic senators are voting with Republicans to repeal parts of the law (like the medical device tax) when they aren’t outright stampeding for the exits shouting, “Train wreck!”
Among the talking points are: “If you like your doctor, you can choose to keep your doctor.” Notice the weasel-word difference – the legalistic plausible deniability – from the original promise? Yes, you can choose, but if your doctor chooses otherwise (such as to retire early, as 80% of physicians are contemplating) because of the burdens put on him/her by the law, or if he or she is no longer in practice as before because the law has forced him/her out of business and into an employee role in a corporation, your “choice” will have no meaning.
As it happens, this author published in February a 100-page toolkit (I called it a pamphlet, but in the spirit of bipartisanship and compromise, “toolkit” will do) to help citizens, including Republicans, to refute the arguments of Obamacare’s hucksters. Here are some of the key issues that were pointed out:
Of course it’s doubtful how effective such pamphlets written by mere citizens (without non-profit status) can be in the face of a publicly-funded propaganda machine backed by almost unlimited resources (how many more times bigger than the Pentagon’s budget is the HHS budget again?). After all, all the opponents of Obamacare have on their side are facts, logic, history, economic science and the Constitution, without pandering to mascots. Pelosi and her fellow travellers have at least three trump cards in their hand: unbeatable organization, the irresistible emotional tug of the sob story, and (they hope) the enduring belief on the part of a large swath of the voting population that there really is a Santa Claus, and his name is Uncle Sam.
Howard Hyde is author of “Pull the Plug on Obamacare,” available in Kindle and paperback editions from Amazon.com. More information, bibliography, table of contents and notes are available at his website: http://www.hhcapitalism.com/p/obamacare.html.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
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