Jay Carney, the talking clown who gamely tries to defend the White House's policies no matter how foolish they are or he sounds, reacted to the now-famous CBO report on the idling of 2.5 million workers because of Obamacare by claiming that O'care simply gives people the freedom to stop working.
You know, sort of like going to prison gives people the freedom to stop robbing banks.
What Carney said is too long to reproduce here but this is a good pull quote:
“Opportunity created by affordable, quality health insurance allows families in America to make a decision about how they will work, or if they will work.”Charles Krauthammer responds:
“He says opportunity. This is what he’s heralding in this achievement, that the government is giving opportunity for people to decide if they want to work. This is the liberals’ ideal of the opportunity society,” Krauthammer said. “Of course, in a free society, you can decide if you want to work, but what Obamacare does, and so the essence of liberalism, is you can choose not to work, and the people who do work end up subsidizing you.”Of course. No one receives health insurance, even under Obamacare, without work. The only question is, Whose work?
In other words, he explained, the people who work “have to send their money to the government” so they can redistribute it to the people who choose, “in this ideal new opportunity society,” not to work.
Let's consider Edna, a working everywoman, for illustration. Edna works two part-time jobs, totaling 40 hours per week, and one day learns that if she quits one job, she will qualify for Obamacare subsidies that are large enough to more than cover the premiums of mandatory insurance that she would have to pay, sans subsidies, if she keeps working both jobs.
In other words, if Edna works both jobs, she earns $100 (say) and has to pay premiums of $20, leaving her $80, minus another $7 in income tax for $73 net. If she drops one job, her income falls to $50, low enough to pay no tax, so she gets that $7 back, and her Obamacare subsidy is $17, meaning that she is already a dollar ahead. And now she qualifies for SNAP, which puts another $15 in her pocket.
Yes, the coldly rational decision is to drop a job and let someone else work to pay for her insurance. I know the actual income and subsidy numbers are different, but when CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf examined the real numbers, he admitted that Obamacare creates a disincentive for people to work. No wonder Krauthammer observed that Obamacare is "giving people the opportunity not to work and to live off the sweat and the work of other people."
This is unjust because only Edna gets to choose. L'Kisha, who earns $67,000 per years as an RN, is working not only to pay for her own health insurance but Edna's too. And L'Kisha doesn't get to decide anything about it. She either complies or suffers penalty of law. And yet it is her labor and her fruit thereof that is being taken from her and given to someone else who is not working simply because she does not want to.
The real question, though, is one I haven't seen Krauthammer or any other commentator address. Why is Edna being given the choice at all? Why does the administration think it is a positive good that some persons not have to work to pay for their own health insurance?
Aren't we supposed to work for the things we want or need? Why is working to pay health insurance premiums different from working to pay for auto-insurance premiums? Or working to pay for a new computer, or a vacation in Yellowstone park, or . . . ?
Of course you know the answer. It is the Left's usual M.O. First they make health insurance mandatory by law to buy. Then they create a premium and subsidy structure that guarantees most of the bottom 50 percent of earners will have to be subsidized. More importantly, though, is that those people soon realize that they cannot earn much more money or their subsidies will be yanked. The financial flogging that would follow therefrom would be unbearable. So they stay poor and dependent on the government simply to stay in stasis.
To the Left, that is not a bug, it is a feature.
I pointed out back in 2009 that the Left seems not to understand that price and cost are not the same. Reducing Edna's pocket price of insurance to nearly zero does nothing to reduce its cost. It simply shifts the price payment. But when complexity is added costs necessarily rise. So health care will become more, not less expensive under Obamacare.
Link here.
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