Zero-Sum Game

A Zero-Sum Game

©2014  Ross Williams

 

 

The most recent Obamacare deadline has just gone into the books, with much back-slapping by its supporters and more raised eyebrows by everyone else.  By my count — and I have assiduously not paid attention — this is the third sign-up deadline.  The first I can remember was at the end of 2013 [fiscal] which, as we all know is September 30th.  Because virtually no one apart from Sandra Fluke had signed up for the Obamacare insurance we'd been told was so absolutely, positively, desperately needed by America's working poor, the Obamacare boosters requested, and Obama gave them for Congress refused, an extension.   The website was disastrously slow, we were told.  How can people sign up when the website doesn't work?

The second sign-up deadline I can remember was December 31st 2013 … the end of the 2013 calendar year.  I also don't recall how many people had signed up for Obamacare at this deadline either, but reportedly they were both pleased with how the government website worked.  But because signups were still light years behind the stated need, the Obamacare boosters requested … and got … another extension.

It was this extension which passed into the history books on March 31st 2014.  And those Democrats not needing to be re-elected in November are falling all over themselves in spoogitastic glee about the numbers … which even the most partisan of outside observers concludes is undoubtedly exaggerated.

The National Savior's administrative mouthpieces — which includes most of the major networks, daily newspapers and weekly news magazines — are all reporting that seven million Americans are signed up for "affordable" health insurance made available by the "Affordable Care Act" … which contains more irony than it does either affordability or care, and even if combined.

Obamacare, at its latest audit, is expected to cost taxpayers two-point-five TRILLION dollars over the first ten years from its passage in June of 2010.  This figure does not include the inflated costs of the insurance premiums that the newly-insured are required by law to buy.  This is simply the cost to the government for the administrative apparatus to make the insurance coverage available, to make enrolling for insurance possible [and thereupon mandatory], to audit the entire population through IRS heavy-handedness to ensure that everyone has health insurance of some kind, and the court time to punish those citizens who still refuse to comply.

Of course, to listen to the rhetoric in the spring of 2010, no one who did not have health insurance was going to refuse to comply with the requirement that they do so.  It was, according to Democrats, a sure thing; inevitable, a Death And Taxes moment.  Why, simply EVERYone who was uninsured would avail himself of the moral goody-goodness of Obamacare.  You'd have gotten better odds wagering against water being wet.

Yet here it is just four short years later and only seven million Americans have signed up for it.

This may seem like a lot of people to some, particularly if they're Democrats — and it is, if you try to fit them all into a Volkswagen or a phone booth at once.  But compared to the entire population of the United States, it's just a hair over 2%, and a bucket in the pool of the uninsured Obamacare was meant to serve.

When we review, we will recall that the "healthcare crisis", as it was labeled, was a creation of the immoral blackguards of the insurance companies, who refused to insure huge swaths of the American People, and for no other reason than their own greed. … which is known, to those who are not socialists, as "profit motive".  If a company doesn't make money on what it sells, it goes out of business and no one can buy that product any longer.  But, still, "insurance is the problem" we were all harangued.

The solution?  More insurance …  but this time it's mandatory.  In order to make it mandatory, it must be profitable for the company selling the insurance.  Because most of what they would be required to "insure" defies actuarial mathematics, the cost of the insurance would rise.  By several hundred percent.  Only suckers believe the snake-oiler when he says he loses money on every sale but makes up for it in volume.  And routine doctor visits and birth control is cheaper in both the long and short term when paid out of your own pocket than it is to hire someone to pay it for you.

According to the weepy, weepy didactics of 2010, fifteen percent of Americans did not have health insurance available to them.  These were the "working poor" that are not covered by other health insurance programs.  Americans over 65 have Medicare; the non-working poor have Medicaid; everyone who holds a full-time job for even a decent wage has employer-provided group health insurance.  The "working poor" includes several million who subsist on a series of part-time jobs — often concurrent — as well as many small business owners whose net profits after expenses barely pays their mortgage.

We are a nation of 310 million people … 310 million people here legally, that is; the number is closer to 325 million when including those who are not legally allowed to be.  Fifteen percent of 310 million is 45 million and change.  After Obamanomics had been going for a few years, the 45 million "working poor" for whom Obamacare was, to quote the embarrassingly unembarrassable Harry Reid, "a lifeline" ballooned to well over 50 million.

It is from these 50 million-plus people, all of whom are required by law to buy health insurance through the "healthcare.gov" website, that the seven million signups are tallied.  And the seven million figure might actually be closer to six million, or even five million.  The rest — between 43 and 45 million — are breaking the law; they are subject to fines and imprisonment.  For the criminal act of not buying health insurance.

Over fifty million people were required by law to sign up for Obamacare health insurance by last Monday; seven million [or maybe five million] have done so.  Obamacare boosters, proving once again their complete inability to do simple arithmetic, have hailed it a success.  Anywhere from ten to fifteen percent of the Obamacare target market purchased the health insurance that they are required by law to purchase, 85 to 90 percent did not, and it's considered a victory by the National Savior's acolytes.

Forty-five million brand new federal criminals are the face of success In Obama's America.  I wonder what a failure would have looked like.