Now That It's Safe to Do So, Left Begins Admitting that Obamacare is a "Sneaky Way" to Press for Single Payer

@morgenr and @verumserum did the work here that the media refused to do: They documented Obamacare's architects and boosters bragging that Obamacare was a Trojan Horse for single payer.

Obamacare was modified since @verumserum and @morgenr exposed this not-so-secret plan; Joe Liberman, representing insurance capital of the US Connecticut, demanded the public option removed from Obamacare to secure his vote.

The Public Option was the Trojan Horse by which the American insurance industry would be destroyed.

That specific provision was removed from Obamacare 1.0, and the law was patched up with bailing wire and duct tape to create the monstrosity we now know as Obamacare 2.0.

But Obamacare 2.0 is destroying the insurance industry well enough, isn't it?

I’m old enough to remember when it was a sign of utmost wingnuttery to suggest that ObamaCare was but phase one in a government takeover of health care, but three years later, now that the law’s momentarily out of political danger, we’ve got HHS ordering insurance companies every other week to change their business practices willy nilly and lefty pundits babbling excitedly about how this is all really just a stepping stone to bigger and better statist interventions. (Some liberals will object that the wingnuttery lies in believing that liberals designed the law to fail. Fair enough — although Scheiber’s own language is revealing, describing O-Care at one point as “a deceptively sneaky way” to get single-payer and saying of GOP efforts to play up the law’s problems that “Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them.”) This, not “if you like your plan,” is the real Big Lie of O-Care. This is where we’re at we’re six days into full implementation.

There is really no need to speak of this as if it's a conspiracy. Politicians have secret back up plans all the time.

For example: Reagan said that his tax cuts would not increase the deficit. He said that lower tax rates would lead to higher growth, and thus increased tax revenue (and on that he was right) and that this, coupled with lower government spending, would lead to balanced budgets. On this last point -- the bit about lower government spending -- he was wrong.

Now, the net effect was this: We grew the deficit substantially during the Reagan Years. (But we hadn't seen nothin' yet, as Obama would teach us.)

So my point is this: Reagan had a Plan A and Plan B. Plan A he talked about a lot: If Reaganomics worked as he envisioned, and if he managed to shrink government as he hoped, Plan A would be a stable, or even falling, budget deficit.

Here's the Plan B he didn't talk about: If he failed to reduce the deficit, he still wasn't giving up on those lowered tax rates. Plan B was that, should the deficit fail to fall, then he'd keep Reaganomics in place and let the deficit rise.

One doesn't have to posit a "conspiracy theory" on the left, or in Obama's White House, to see a similar Announced Plan A/Hidden Plan B scheme at work. No, they probably did not intend for to create such a huge embarrassment and such an unpopular law.

But they also knew that what they were doing probably would not work.

They hoped for Announced Plan A to work. Just as Reagan hoped Announced Plan A -- lower tax rates, lower deficits -- would come to pass.

But they do have a Hidden Plan B should Announced Plan A not quite work out.

posted by Ace at 04:31 PM

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