RUSH: ‘Can We Repeal Health Care?’ Great post here over the weekend by somebody named Dr. Zero at Hot Air.com. It’s very long, I’m not going to read the whole thing to you but you’ll get the gist. ‘The early battle cry of ‘Repeal and Replace!’ has become stuck in a few Republican throats. The
thinking among ‘top Republicans’ is that outright repeal of Obamacare might be impossible, leading to frustration among an energized base that demands nothing less. There is also some apprehension that an uncompromising push for repeal will alienate moderate and independent voters in otherwise winnable states.’ If there’s anybody on our side that believes that, they seriously need a head cracking. Independents and moderates upset if we try to repeal it? Who the hell do they think is deserting President Obama in droves because of health care? It’s independents! The Republicans are ahead by nine points in the generic ballot, something like that. Are we back to this again? Are we back to this cowardice in the Republican Party where they’re afraid if they do anything that appears to be confrontational that the moderates and independents aren’t going to like it and start running back to Obama? That is, frankly, absurd.
‘Declaring repeal to be ‘impossible’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy of American decline. A slapdash pile of graft and fraudulent cost projections, passed by a fantastically corrupt Congress that claims it couldn’t hear the muffled screams of the outraged electorate through the thick doors of their smoke-filled rooms, instantly becomes an eternal component of our lives? That will only be true if we make it true… and even then, it won’t be true for long. One way or another, Obamacare won’t last far beyond the point where your kids go bankrupt trying to pay for it. The American entitlement state is the world’s tallest, shakiest house of cards. We can find the strength and self-respect to repeal this garbage now, or weep in shame and confusion when it implodes, after years of increasing poverty and decreasing public health.’ That’s just the open. It goes on for another two-and-a-quarter pages, and I firmly agree with that, this idea of repeal and replace and so forth, just repeal it. Just repeal it, and it can be done.
Stephen Spruiell, National Review Online: ‘Does Kentucky’s Experience with Health-Insurance Overregulation Hold Lessons for Repealing Obamacare? ‘In the mid-1990s, Kentucky was one of eight state governments that boldly went where the rest of the country refused to go: The commonwealth imposed Clintoncare’s restrictions on its insurance companies, even though Clintoncare had been vanquished from the national stage. In Kentucky and the other seven states, insurance premiums skyrocketed, healthy people stopped buying insurance, and insurance companies exited the market in droves. Only three of the eight were able to untangle themselves from the harmful provisions; only one, Kentucky, was able to pull off a full repeal.
‘Trey Grayson was elected Kentucky secretary of state in 2003, the year before Gov. Ernie Fletcher was able to finalize the repeal — you’ll note it took ten years to accomplish. Grayson, who is currently running for the Republican nomination to replace Jim Bunning in the US Senate, says that those pushing to repeal Obamacare can take a few lessons from the Kentucky experience. ‘On the one hand it gives you some hope, because in Kentucky we were able to gradually repeal the elements that were driving up the number of uninsured, that were increasing premiums at a rate higher than the national average, that were driving insurance companies out of the state,’ Grayson says. ‘But unfortunately it took ten years, caused rates to be higher, hurt our economy and hurt our state government from a revenue standpoint. So a lot of damage was done,” in those ten years. Then they get into the history of how it all happened. But they had the same components. You didn’t have to buy insurance ’til you got sick. You didn’t have to buy insurance if you don’t want to, at all.
Now, they do point out that’s not quite the case in Obamacare. Everybody has to buy insurance or pay a fine, which is much less than the policy will be. And so people will pay the fine. There will be people uninsured. What happened in Kentucky, documented here in this piece by Stephen Spruiell at National Review Online, is exactly what we’ve been predicting will happen with Obamacare. Once you make an insurance company cover somebody only from the moment they get sick or have the accident, it’s not insurance anymore and eventually premiums skyrocket in order to pay for this because you weren’t buying premiums, you were buying actually coverage or actual payment for treatment. Insurance companies fled the state. They just closed up shop. It got so bad, so expensive, it caused more people to lose coverage because more companies went out the door, and the state did not pick up the slack. Republicans and Democrats worked together to fix it.
Back in 1994 they thought Hillarycare was the best thing to come down the pike so they implemented it anyway even though it was vanquished. So it took ten years. One out of eight states was able to fully repeal it. Two or three engaged in partial repeals. But it can be done. And this guy who calls himself Dr. Zero is exactly right. We’re either going to repeal this or it’s going to implode at some point down the line, probably when your children start earning enough money to pay taxes, if they’re not already. It will be your kids and your grandkids. It will probably implode before your grandkids start paying anything. But either way, it’s going to terminate. But if we repeal it, we have a chance of saving the country. If it implodes, we lose the country as we know it, which is what all this opposition to it is about in the first place. That’s why we’re saying, ‘We just don’t want to lose the country as it was founded. We just don’t.’