George Rebane

As it gathers steam, the national travesty that is Obamacare is now taking big bites out of our nation’s commonweal, and the real tragedy is yet to come.  Since arriving in the dark of night three years ago, it is now morphing into the gigantic puzzle palace that all government programs eventually become.  Obamacare’s puzzle palace is the Health and Human Services Department that now displays a “special combination of rigidity and ineptitude” beyond what was predicted for a program that is supposed to launch and be running by October 2013.

States are shying away from the law’s so-called “clearinghouses” which promise new orders of red tape and government inefficiency.  HHS, that so far has issued more than 13,000 pages of useless regulations, is refusing to answer states’ questions on how they are supposed to manage their ends of Obamacare.  The 14dec12 WSJ reports – 

…  for the better part of a year states and groups like the bipartisan National Governors Association and the National Association of Medicaid Directors have been begging HHS merely for information about how they're required to make ObamaCare work in practice. There was radio silence from Washington, with time running out. Louisiana and other states even took to filing Freedom of Information Act requests, which are still pending.

It is clear that the HHS does not know what it is doing, and is desperately trying to make something up by next October that doesn’t embarrass this administration too much, while forgetting that this administration does not embarrass at all as it staggers toward socialism.

In a word, HHS is treating the states not as the partners it needs to give ObamaCare any chance of success, but as serfs.

Meanwhile, companies are responding by restructuring their workforces, laying people off and making some into part-time employees – anything to escape the latest titan of bureaucratic burdens on our nation’s economy.   And the rest of us pikers are just getting the dribs and drabs of Obamacare’s latest bad news as prescribed by the Pelosi Principle.  It is clear to me that this mess will be way bigger than any of us predicted when that lump of coal arrived in our stocking on Christmas eve three years ago.

H.L Mencken in the 1930s kept a keen and gimlet eye on the mass of bureaucracies launched by FDR’s New Deal, and wondered about the mentality that was behind the onslaught that pushed the nation deeper and deeper into depression until the administration finally threw up its hands and admitted defeat in 1939.  Of this Mencken observed that –

Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people's money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse—always at someone else's expense, and usually at the taxpayer's. . . .
 
Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise—a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine.

[update]  Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre.  This is the latest in a string of such mass shootings that reflect a sign of our times.  In the previous post 'War on Words' where discussion of this tragedy was starting, I posted a comment that in part reads – "… I see much merit in the proposal to permit legal guns in schools so
that such mad shooters don't have a safe environment in which to go on a
serial killing spree. It is today's world, after all.

Rumination – how did we become a world where such mass killings are
becoming so commonplace? And the simple answer that guns are easy to
get today won't wash – today it is harder to get hands on a gun than at
any time in our history.   50 years ago, anyone could have an M-1
semi-automatic carbine or other equivalent weapon(s), and commit similar
atrocities in crowded places like malls, theaters, and schools.  But to
us then it was unthinkable, today it no longer is. What happened?"