Obamacare Wreaking Havoc

Those who would heal should honor the teaching of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates: “First, do no harm.”

Alas, as this column noted last week, President Barack Obama’s healthcare law is now doing immense harm to the health of millions of Americans, as well as to our nation’s body politic and economic.

Obamacare has unleashed a new malady that I call “Obamacare stress,” triggering high levels of cortisol and other stress chemicals that are raising widespread anxiety, fear, and anger. This new health hazard is raising America’s blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart attacks for millions, and sowing the stress seeds that can cause future cancers.

If Obamacare were an environmental chemical that produced such toxic effects, President Obama’s bureaucrats would rightly ban it.

In recent days, Obama, apparently to pacify 16 frightened Democratic senators who face re-election in 2014, shifted his blame duck rhetoric from deceptive Orwellian rewriting of history to something his media sycophants could pretend was an apology.

“I am sorry that they [the 4.2 million whose health insurance policies have already been cancelled] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” Obama said in an interview with one of his most devoted lap dogs, Chuck Todd of NBC News.

President Obama limited his responsibility for this human disaster to his failure to be more qualified in the promises he had made. He did not lift a finger to help restore their “inferior” lost insurance policies, nor to admit what everyone now knows.

At least 30 times in front of voters and TV cameras, Obama made promises like this, from a speech to the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, while Congress was debating healthcare:

“No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

Less than a year later in Portland, Ore., with Obamacare signed into law, Obama told an audience: “And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.” He made this promise on April Fool’s Day, with fingers crossed and America double-crossed.

By 2010, if not before, President Obama apparently already knew that millions would lose their health insurance policies, according to documents found by NBC’s Lisa Myers.

Within the next year or so, as many as 93 million Americans will lose their current insurance, estimates the Kaiser Family Foundation. New Obamacare-approved replacement policies will cost on average 41 percent more, according to the Manhattan Institute. As Craig R. Smith’s and my new book "The Great Withdrawal" shows, in today’s anemic economy this will force millions underwater.

Obama is not a healing modern Hippocrates, just a nanny-statist hypocrite doing terrible harm.

Thomas Jefferson said that “great issues should not be forced on slender majorities.”

Partisan Democrats literally locked Republicans out of the room where Obamacare was being drafted by leftist ideologues and Democratic cronies. The resulting bill passed with only Democratic votes. Democrats had to resort to a parliamentary gimmick, declaring that the measure was “presumed to have passed” to avoid a new vote they would lose.

One could say that Democrats seized one-sixth of the American economy through Obamacare not with a slender majority but with no legitimate majority at all.

Since Obamacare is a law fathered only by the Democratic Party, all its costs should be paid not by taxpayers and its other victims, but entirely by the Democratic Party and President Obama.

Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"; "The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us . . . And Seven Ways to Stop It"; and "Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America's Optimistic Golden Age." His new book is "The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back." Read more reports from Lowell Ponte — Click Here Now.