This week the very diminutive actor Danny DeVito made an idiot of himself, again, by complaining about the Oscar nominations and the lack of black nominees this year. Now, I think I went as far as I wanted to this week with this piece on the subject, but that's not the point.
Danny DeVito is five feet tall. You pretty much can't look at him without taking note of his stature, unless, I suppose, you are a good friend and have long since discounted his height. I don't think the less of him, however, because of his height, nor even in spite of it; I simply think he has absurd views on some things -- the Oscars being one -- and that is even more striking than his being five feet tall.
He was in the news this week with his pronouncement on how racist the USA supposedly is. Once in the news, he made my mind wander to the fact that he is someone who, by comparison, would make me feel almost "tall" if I were standing next to him. That's "tall", as in a guy five and a half feet tall (me) standing next to a guy five feet tall.
In other words, it's all relative. I've been the butt of good-natured jokes all my life about being short. I've heard "Stand up, Bob!" so many times in just one group of friends, I can no longer count. But by Danny DeVito standards, I'm a regular Shaq. In other words, if I wanted to feel as if I were actually tall, I just need to surround myself with people shorter than I am.
Another way to put it -- if I want to achieve success without actually succeeding, I should simply find a less-successful environment against which to compare myself. Got it?
So that's where we come all the way back to -- you guessed it -- Obamacare.
I have seen a few passing references in the Washington Post, and by its letter writers and op-ed columnists, suggesting that it had been somehow "successful". Each time I have silently gone "Huh?" and moved on. I say "passing" because the context is invariably about something else. That is, the writer is making some other statement, about the administration, or kittens, or football, and slips in a phrase like "the success of Obamacare" or something -- as if they were paid there, at the Post, on how many times they could slip that in.
But that's the point. The only way you can call Obamacare a success is either to use unsupportable qualitative terminology instead of numbers, or to ignore the premise on which it was foisted upon the nation in the first place.
Remember this -- Obamacare was passed with no Republican votes, when the Democrats ruled both houses of Congress with filibuster-proof majorities and even then had to pull a parliamentary trick called "budget reconciliation" to get it through. But get it through they did.
Given they had no Republican support, we have to assume that the law was written precisely the way its authors wanted it. After all, they clearly didn't have to compromise on anything to get Republican votes -- there weren't any. And if it was what they wanted, then it should have accomplished their goals, right?
So what were those goals? Let's go to the videotape, or at least the speeches. Here are a few of the real whoppers that Obamacare was supposed to deliver. Remember these? They're all out there and Googleable.
- If you like your health care plan, you can keep it (I lost mine completely, BTW. Gone. Under Obamacare, it became illegal, like many high-deductible, low-premium plans for healthy people)
- If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor (I kept mine, but only because he happened to be on one of the three plans I was forced to choose from, when mine was made illegal)
- Insurance premiums will go down an average of $2500 per family per year (I hope that someone's premium went down to keep that "average", since ours went up $6,480 per year)
- Obama would not sign a plan that would add one dime to the deficit (there's a hilarious op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that makes the case for why Obamacare is supposed to be so wonderful because it only cost the government -- i.e., the taxpayer -- $506 billion instead of the $710 billion it was thought to cost. That $506 billion it will cost is a lot of "dimes".)
- Every American would have health insurance (the CBO now projects that after ten years of the law, 31 million Americans will still be uninsured, which was the original purpose of the law).
I hope you get the idea. The original purpose of the law was to ensure that all Americans had health insurance. Obamacare doesn't even achieve that! So you have silly statements in defense of Obamacare like the above one -- "See, it doesn't cost the taxpayer $710 billion, it only costs $506 billion", and that's supposed to be a good thing. "See, 20 million Americans now have coverage -- the law is a huge success" except for those pesky 31 million who, um, you know, don't.
Get what I'm after here? Obamacare by its own original standards is a gargantuan, bloated, expensive failure. Obama and his congressional lackeys could ignore the opposition and pass it without challenge -- they got what they wanted and it is still a failure, by its own standards.
Well, they have to say that it succeeded, or there would be no reason not to repeal the whole gargantuan, bloated, expensive law. So they have taken a page from the old playbook and moved the goal posts to where their kick was already sailing. They have created a whole new set of standards against which it looks just fine -- by comparison. If it weren't for that pesky Internet, they might get us to forget all those original goals.
Against the standards of its creation, it is simply awful, and has achieved little, if anything, worthy of its $506 billion cost to the Government and insane premium hikes for people like us. But if you spin it as somehow not "good", per se, but "not as bad as some critics said it would be", well, then, you have a bloody success on your hands. Except for one thing -- by normal standards, not leftist spinner standards, it is not a success.
And by normal standards, not Danny DeVito standards, I'm still a short guy.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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