Truth Will Out

Paul Krugman wrote a blog post yesterday refuting the lies which attempt to discredit the “health care reform” legislation known as the “Affordable Care Act,” and in doing so revealed the bigger lie that underlies its passage to begin with and even it’s very name. ”What the Act does,” he said, “is in effect to increase the burden on fortunate people — the healthy and wealthy — to lift some burdens on the less fortunate…”

And that is most certainly not the sales pitch that we were given when “health care reform” was being touted as the answer to the problems which plagued our system. Much was made of the rising cost of health insurance, and we were told that this legislation was going to “bend the cost curve downward,” not that it was going to increase the cost for most of us so that those who did not yet have insurance could obtain it.

We were told that “the Act” would be paid for with all sorts of arcane methods which none of us were quite smart enough to understand. Part of the payment, for instance, would be reductions in Medicare payments which would be absorbed by providers and not offset by reductions in services. They did not explain why the providers who were being paid less would not reduce services.

There were some protests that it was absurd to think requiring insurance companies to cover people who had preexisting conditions would not inevitably raise insurance premiums. They were shouted down as obstructionists, but now Paul Krugman is admitting that such was the intention all along; people without an existing condition will “bear a higher burden” so that people with existing conditions can obtain insurance.

The whole “zero cost” basis of “the Act” sounded like smoke and mirrors to me from the beginning, and Paul Krugman admits from his ivory tower in Princeton that it was indeed a fiction. Every once in a while one of the elites slips up and speaks the truth and make no mistake, notwithstanding how much the liberals love to quote him, Paul Krugman is one of the elites. He has no more concept of the middle class ethos than do the Koch brothers.

Having one group pay more in order to assist another, needier group is not an unworthy proposition, it’s what federal unemployment benefits are about for instance, so I don’t necessarily object to the fiscal basis of “the Act.” What I do object to is being lied to again; being sold something on the basis that “it won’t cost a dime” when it is known very well that the financing is nonsense. I object to the cost finally being admitted only after five years of government maintaining the “zero cost” fiction.