There are some who will "love" President Obama, his unflappable demeanor even as he lied and lied and lied about Obamacare, Michelle Obama's homey "garden" of "healthy food" even as food stamps were slashed by Obama's Administration, the feel good tones of a "We've got it under control," even as the country's middle class spiraled downward into barely middle class and the government class of public employees enjoyed superior treatment replacing the middle class who funds them as the "new" middle class. It's a little strange, but I get it, sometimes calmly denying reality is comforting.
But President Trump doesn't have it so easy as people point to every action or inaction as failure, every imagined action as treason, every slanderous falsehood as evidence. For that, he gets to be irritated. Even President Obama scolded and expressed his parental disappointment with the hundreds of years of the American experience, its voters, its form of government on the few occasions he didn't get his way and as he used staff salaries and time to manipulate loopholes to somehow do what he wanted anyway.
Don't kid yourself, there is not enough distance from that presidency to make anyone look sensible defending that presidency. But Obamacare is a bigger indictment of Congress, then and now.
Though there is not enough distance from the still existing Obamacare to remind us that not only was it a deal between Obama's political ambitions and manipulations and insurance companies, by now I'm sure you've read the source document for Obamacare by AHIP in 2008, but it NEVER worked as envisioned with the battle lines drawn between a ruined public and an Administration that drained money out of historical successes to fund Obama, his ego, "his" plan.
But here we are with another Congress that for all intents and purposes is a lazy, lying, self-motivated dung-heap of the worst kind of people in office and yes, I'll add the words "in my opinion," lest their fragile personalities become outraged. Obviously it's my opinion, but with the pitiful approval ratings boasted by the spoiled public employees over the last decade, it's also pretty obvious that there are at least some as disgusted as I am.
Obamacare was a disaster in large part because of the blanket support by Democrats, some even proudly announcing they never read the law, and their willingness to follow every allotment for throwing money at whatever problem arose. Advertising Obamacare, billions. Funding Obamacare, billions. Wrongful payouts in the hundreds of millions. Computer glitches again, multi-millions. People losing their plans, not even counted as anything but additional enrollees when they were forced into exchanges. People who formerly could afford insurance but no longer could under the family glitch, again, single digit millions dropped and invisible to the Obama Administration.
But now we've got Republicans, and like their dominant Democratic useless overpaid public employees before them, they too are clinging to their superior benefits package, utilizing the same ridiculously obscene exploitation of the American taxpayer by categorizing the federal government as their employer and by making rules as that employer that they get up to 72 percent of their premiums paid for and plans that resemble only the best plans some can remember from years ago. It's hard to take them seriously.
When you calculate the money being paid to Congress people, it's evident that it's time for a change. It doesn't matter which party, it does matter which candidate. The first test for those of us who know that neither Obamacare nor whatever the Republicans are coming up with will help consumers is: Are you making your law apply to you, to every public employee whose salary and benefits is being paid for by the American people? If the answer is no, there is nothing more to work on and they need to go.
There are no Congressional heroes in the Obamacare, the food stamp, the Medicaid or the Medicare story. There are no champions, no caring individuals whose lips wither before daring to categorize a lifetime of working and paying in as an "entitlement," while enabling their own generous pensions, security and benefits off our backs. There are no champions of the poor, who shamefacedly admit or at least attempt disguise their greedy self-justification and showboating demanding that the American people get our money's worth.
Obamacare is garbage, the Republican plan is garbage and it's because the language of providing effective government safety nets for consumers paying the highest prices in the world for often less-than-spectacular results is garbage.
