Washington has a bad habit of naming laws by what they are not.
These usually win temporary public support. (Who wants to be against anything “affordable”?) But such idealistically named legislation usually turns out to be aimed at special interests and the opposite of what voters were promised.
The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010,” a k a ObamaCare, frontloaded for immediate enactment some popular freebies. Who would oppose keeping children on their parents’ health coverage until age 26, or prohibiting denial of insurance for those with pre-existing illnesses?
Then, three years later and with two elections out of the way, the tab for all the perks suddenly came due. The law turns out neither to protect patients from rate hikes nor to make health care affordable. In fact, the administration promises of 2009-10 are becoming the nightmare of 2013.
Health premiums are skyrocketing. So far, the ObamaCare sign-up Web site has made going to the DMV seem like a picnic. Businesses aren’t more competitive as promised, but are cutting back on full-time employees. The deficit won’t go down due to ObamaCare.
Doctors don’t welcome the radical changes; many may retire to avoid them. Healthy young adults aren’t rushing to buy ObamaCare plans — at least not once they learn that they’ll pay a lot for something they use rarely to pay for others who pay little for something they’ll use constantly.
All individuals must buy a plan or pay a penalty, while businesses have already been given a one-year reprieve from skyrocketing expenses of the coverage. Congressional and administration staffers who wrote the law, insider businesses that supported it and pet unions that donated for it now all want to be excused from it.
When the national debt has just hit $17 trillion and Medicare and Social Security are facing impending insolvency, another gargantuan redistributive entitlement does not seem a good way to revive the economy or streamline the nation’s health care.
ObamaCare does government. It increases the federal workforce. And clerks in Washington will judge which Americans have too much health care and which have too little — and then even everything out.
Our next fight is over “comprehensive immigration reform.” Washington knows what the public supports, and so it certainly offers the necessary platitudes. There are promises of a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have avoided public assistance, lived a long time in the United States and haven’t been convicted of crimes.
Applicants, we’re told, must be willing to learn English, pay a fine and get in line behind those who played by the immigration rules. The public also first wants a closed border and legal immigration based on ethnically blind and meritocratic criteria.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what congressional supporters of the comprehensive reform really want. There will be no comprehensive guarantees that illegal immigration will first cease. Most legal immigration will still be based on family ties and proximity to the southern border, not on education or skill requirements. Those convicted of many sorts of crimes may still be eligible for amnesty. Dependence on public assistance will be not necessarily be a barrier to citizenship. In other words, the bill will be comprehensively disingenuous.
Every five years or so, we also see a farm bill that must delude a public that is skeptical about paying out billions of dollars to wealthy farmers and expanding food stamps to include those who aren’t impoverished.
In 1996 it was called the Freedom to Farm Act (officially the “Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996”) — on the promise that the bill would downsize and then eliminate federal farm subsidies in seven years. It didn’t.
Instead, after 9/11, Congress rushed in an even more generous replacement bill under the guise of “security.” Apparently, we were supposed to believe that “The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002” would make us safer from al Qaeda.
Now there’s the 2013 “Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act,” still being debated. If the past is any guide, this won’t lead to reform, more food or more jobs. It will continue to give profitable farmers more federal money when commodity prices are high and government insolvent. And it will subsidize groceries to a record number of recipients at a time when epidemic obesity, not malnutrition, threatens the health of millions of lower-income Americans. Food choice, not scarcity, is our national challenge.
Beware of Congress bearing the gifts of beautifully misnamed laws.