Reality Is A Harsh Mistress

A pair of ObamaCare "We told you so"s via Ensign Ed today....

***Who are the most frequent users of emergency room medical services?  The Obamunists insisted it was "the uninsured."  Force everybody else to pay for insuring "the uninsured," went their argument, and emergency room medical service utilization, which is among the most costly and least efficient modes of health care delivery, would plummet, and overall health care spending along with it.

Free marketeers countered that it is not "the insured," but Medicaid patients that flood emergency rooms to get their health care.  And how did the Obamunists plan to massively expand coverage to "the uninsured"?  Medicaid.

Are we learning yet?

Emergency rooms, the only choice for patients who can’t find care elsewhere, may grow even more crowded with longer wait times under the nation’s new health law.

That might come as a surprise to those who thought getting thirty-two million more people covered by health insurance would ease ER crowding. It would seem these patients would be able to get routine health care by visiting a doctor’s office, as most of the insured do....

The biggest users of emergency rooms by far are Medicaid recipients. And the new health insurance law will increase their ranks by about sixteen million. Medicaid is the state and federal program for low-income families and the disabled. And many family doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients they take because of low government reimbursements.

The answer, of course, is simple: Amend O-Care to force family doctors to take unlimited Medicaid patients anyway.  And when family doctors are driven out of medical practice because they can't stay in business under those restrictions, amend O-Care again to conscript them into permanent indentured servitude government service, complete with standard regime-issue purpleshirt and happy-face swastika armband.  IOW, if you can beat 'em, force 'em to join you.

Are we learning yet?  If you refuse to listen to facts and reason and rationality and reality and just use force to impose your destructive will anyway, there's nothing you can't accomplish.

***And nothing you can't get away with:

The Obama administration has not ruled out turning sick people away from an insurance program created by the new healthcare law to provide coverage for the uninsured.

Critics of the $5 billion high-risk pool program insist it will run out of money before January 1, 2014. That’s when the program sunsets and health plans can no longer discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

administration officials insist they can make changes to the program to ensure it lasts until 2014, and that it may not have to turn away sick people. Officials said the administration could also consider reducing benefits under the program, or redistributing funds between state pools. But they acknowledged turning some people away was also a possibility.

“There’s a certain amount of money authorized in the statute, and we will do our best to make sure that that amount of money insures as many people as possible and does as much good as possible,” said Jay Angoff, director of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “I think it’s premature to say [what happens] when it’s gone.”

Not really, Jay.  It's pretty much a binary choice: Spend more (I'd say "go over budget," but Dems don't DO budgets anymore) or toss millions of poor little Tiny Tims and Cindy Lou Whos cartwheeling into the nearest yellow snowbank without their roast beast gruel.  Given that Republicans will be in power then, and if they haven't managed to repeal this mess, what do you think Donks will be howling for?

But I love this Rob Port punchline if the Dems want to whip out their viagra'd inner Scrooge in the austere times to come:

Just so we got this straight, it might be ok for the government to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, because letting people refrain from getting insurance until they’re sick is a good way to lose a lot of money, but private insurance companies....?

Well, it’s evil when they do it. 

Thats the Official Regime Narrative, Rob.  Government is good, the people are bad; government is righteous, the people are evil; government is the height of virtue, the people are the depths of squalor and vice.  Facts are irrelevant, objective truth doesn't exist, only what Barack Obama says matters.  Because he's "some kind of a god."

Who will, you know, have you and your family thrown into cryogenic suspension on his way out to another jet-date with Scheherezade if he decides he doesn't want to keep you rabble alive and consuming resources he made scarce by design, unless you start showing more "gratitude" for all he's "done for us."

I'm starting to think it's Barry who invented the "incompetence" angle himself.  Better to let da peepul think you're a hopeless boob than the ruthless despot you're well on your way to becoming.