George Rebane

Here’s a short puzzle –

What will be specified in the IRS tax code, cost your family between $750 and $3,800 annually, is paid to the IRS, and for failure to pay will draw punishments of fines and jail time from a federal court, and yet is NOT a tax?

Our Fearless Liar told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that this was not a tax, but a mandated fee that people who failed to buy health insurance would be forced to pay under ObamaCare.  He didn’t say that if you resist, they will kill you. 

This tax was pronounced to be “not a tax” by a hubris laden leader who is taking the country beyond his promised “fundamental transformational change”.  His sonorous lies have now become a continuous torrent that daily soothes the many who remain in the terminal thrall of hopeful change.

More truth about the Canadian one-payer healthcare system is bubbling to the surface, in spite of the full court propaganda press that the Left has mounted to extol the virtues of the healthcare heaven just north of the border.  There the rationing of all significant medical services has gotten so bad that even lower middle-class people are driving to the United States for treatments that range from timely tumor removals to surgeries that re-enable productive lives.

But perhaps the most telling and verifiable symptom of Canada’s dysfunctional system is the emergence of the ‘private option’ that Team Obama says doesn’t work in America.  From today’s WSJ –

Hoping to capitalize on patients who might otherwise go to the U.S. for speedier care, a network of technically illegal private clinics and surgical centers has sprung up in British Columbia, echoing a trend in Quebec. In October, the courts will be asked to decide whether the budding system should be sanctioned. More than 70 private health providers in British Columbia now schedule simple surgeries and tests such as MRIs with waits as short as a week or two, compared with the months it takes for a public surgical suite to become available for nonessential operations.

A former Canadian healthcare professional sums it up nicely, “What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list.”

Oh yes, almost all progressives will claim that no one will actually kill you for not paying ObamaCare’s opt-out tribute – that is just another bunch of libertarian hyperbole.  They will even go so far as to point out that your death at the hands of the local SWAT team came about because you used force to resist arrest, and not because you didn’t pay the mandated fee which you knew to be unconstitutional.  They will argue that your stated willingness to risk all against encroaching state tyranny was the product of a typical right-wing extremist brain that maintains insane notions about our Constitution.  All today’s proper thinkers know that the Constitution permits the government to mandate how you spend your healthcare dollars, and the subsequent use of deadly force to eliminate those who resist.

It is these compassionate, sensitive, inclusive, and soft-headed people who don’t know how government must needs work, and why our Founders wrote the Constitution, not as an enabling document for the increase of government, but as a prescription for constraining the state from trampling individual liberties.