Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Health insurance good enough for the idiots

Back in 2009 we had a prescient warning about Obamacare from Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former Car Czar of Romania--though he thought he was warning us about General Motors future (fortunately its fate was largely left to experienced auto professionals);
When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men. 
Which is pretty much what Harvard's David Cutler told Larry Summers and Peter Orzag back in 2010, about health care, according to the Washington Post;
“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign.... “It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.”
Obama emulated the late Ceausescu and forged ahead with a political operative;
 ...led by Nancy-Ann De­Parle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform — to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”
Similar to what happened in Romania, as Pacepa told it; 
We ended up with a license for an antiquated and about-to-be-discontinued Renault-12 car, because it was the cheapest. "Good enough for the idiots," Ceausescu decided, showing what he thought of the Romanian people. He baptized the car Dacia, to commemorate Romania's 2,000-year history going back to Dacia Felix, as the ancient Romans called that part of the world. In that government-run economy, symbolism was the most important consideration, especially when it came to things in short supply (such as food).
"Too luxurious for the idiots," Ceausescu decreed when he saw the first Dacia car made in Romania. Immediately, the radio, right side mirror and backseat heating were dropped. Other "unnecessary luxuries" were soon eliminated by the bureaucrats and their workers' union that were running the factory. The car that finally hit the market was a stripped-down version of the old, stripped-down Renault 12. "Perfect for the idiots," Ceausescu approved. Indeed, the Romanian people, who had never before had any car, came to cherish the Dacia.
Obama's twist on this is that even people who did have a functioning product--health insurance that paid their medical bills--are going to lose it. It's too luxurious for the idiots who voted for him, so now they get, contrary to years of promises that they could keep what they were 'felixed' with, what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid think is 'good enough' for them.
Knuckleheads.

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