If You Like Your Current Health Plan – Get Over It

Many in this country are wondering these days if there isn’t a way to have a do-over of the 2012 election. Some might even be thinking the 2008 election ought to be re-done too. What brought this on, you ask? Well, quite possibly the results of the 2008 and 2012 elections. Elections, as Democrats are fond of telling anyone who’ll listen (and even those who aren’t listening), have consequences. And these two elections have left us with some doozies.

As is now well documented, the Obamacare health insurance exchanges hit the ground on October 1. That happened to be the same day President Obama learned that building a functioning website is more difficult than giving a speech, even a speech without telepromters. That is also the day that many liberals began to learn that liberalism is expensive. As the Los Angeles Times reported, many Californians are being cancelled by their current insurance companies because their policies don’t meet the new minimum coverage requirements demanded by the Affordable Care Act. The result, for those few who have actually navigated successfully through the Obamacare website, is a bit of a wakeup call. The Times story mentioned a letter that Pam Kehaly, president of California’s Anthem Blue Cross, received from a young woman who was complaining about her 50% rate hike due to Obamacare. The woman’s letter said, “I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it.”

Therein resides the great liberal conundrum. It’s great to be caring, compassionate and, heck, even liberal as long as someone else is paying the bill. A lot of people apparently believed Obama when he stated, repeatedly, that if you like your insurance plan you can keep it. In fact, he guarantied it. They believed the Democrats when they said the Affordable Care Act would be, well, affordable. But not to worry, that new policy that now costs you three times what your previous policy did does include “free’ contraceptives. And the really good news is that your new deductible will be a little less than the GDP of Brunei.

And if Obama ever utters the phrase, “if you like your kids, you can keep them,” that’s probably your cue to be concerned. You might want to have a chat with them and explain how much you have really enjoyed living with them and to not be such strangers in the future and to be sure to Like you on Facebook, if they have the chance.

Oh, and the website, geez! It’s so bad that the Obama administration is now touting the toll free number where one can provide personal information to Obamacare navigators. Or one can submit paper applications to those same navigators. What does that get you? Not much since those folks still must enter all that information into THAT SAME LOUSY WEBSITE! There is another option now under consideration – using stone tablets. In those rare instances when someone actually successfully registers through either the Obamacare website or one of the state exchanges, the applicant and doctor information is often incorrect. You don’t speak Farsi or Russian? The government now thinks you do – and you’ll soon be hearing from the NSA. Your doctor may be a gynecologist, but to the government says he’s an ophthalmologist. Boy, that’s an eye chart that could get somebody hauled in on pornography charges.

But ponder this: What ought to concern everyone is the best part of Obamacare might actually be the website.

Curtice Mang is the author of the book, The Constitution – I’m Not Kidding and Other Tales of Liberal Folly. He can be contacted at www.mangwrites.com, where one can also purchase his book; or contact Curtice at mangwrites at cox.net.