Some took a false sense of comfort from the Obama administration’s decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate. But the real train wreck coming towards us is ObamaCare’s state insurance exchanges. They are scheduled to debut in January.
In today’s must-read, headlined “Stop the Train—We Want to Get Off,” Bill Kristol writes:
If the exchanges are permitted to go into effect on January 1, 2014, there will be error, fraud, inefficiency, arbitrariness, and privacy violations aplenty. Isn’t the Obama administration concerned about that? Yes. Wouldn’t it be in their interest to agree to delay the exchanges? Not really. There’s a reason the administration is vehemently resisting delay. There’s a reason the Obama administration will claim, till hell freezes over, that all is well with the exchanges, or is going to be well, or would be well, if only the critics would be quiet.
Why? Because the exchanges are the beating heart of Obamacare. They are the mechanism for the government subsidies designed to make millions more Americans ever more dependent on big government. The Obama administration will no more acknowledge fundamental problems in the health care exchanges than Leonid Brezhnev would have acknowledged fundamental problems with Soviet central planning.
This means, as Kristol points out, that a new phase in the battle to save ourselves from this monstrous health plan is upon us: ObamaCare can’t for now be repealed (though that is the ultimate goal), so it is essential to fight to delay the exchanges.
The Obama administration is using the employer mandate delay to launch a massive ad campaign (paid for by us, natch) to extol the largely imaginary benefits of ObamaCare. If the exchanges can be delayed, we have more time to tell the public about the train wreck that is coming our way.