Healthcare Ration Once Again Increased!

The President has in effect repealed Obamacare, as the WSJ documents here. Under the pressure of complaints from millions of people left without insurance because Obamacare's regulations cancelled the plans they were on while replacing them with a) nothing, because the malfunctioning "marketplace" made it impossible to connect with any plan or b) nothing, because they could not afford the massively higher deductibles and massively higher premiums, the President has swept aside the individual mandate. Not for everyone, just for those who lost their insurance because of Obamacare.

So merry Christmas. If ObamaCare's benefit and income redistribution requirements made your old, cheaper, better health plan illegal, you now have the option of going without coverage without the government taking your money as punishment. You can also claim the tautological consolation of an ObamaCare hardship exemption due to ObamaCare itself.

It's mildly good news for those people that they now (temporarily!) won't be fined for not having what the government destroyed, and do read the whole piece, which shows how since Obamacare depends upon those fees, it is in essence destroyed now.

By my count, the only part of the law that now stands is the rule that businessmen and religious institutions that object to paying for their employees' abortions, abortifacient drugs, lifestyle-choice sterilizations and gender reassignment surgeries must do so. Everything is negotiable in the law EXCEPT the principle that the deeply held convictions of the majority of Americans MUST be compromised as the price of doing business, because the business of America is sexual license.

You know what's also not destroyed? The new "principle" by which we accept the President's ability on a whim to apply laws selectively, such that there is no equality before the law --regulators decide who the law applies to and who it doesn't. Apparently there's no right of contract, either, since the President and his regulators first decided what product insurance companies could offer and cancelled old products, then mandated people must buy the new plans, then when people couldn't pay, the government said the cancelled plans could continue but for an unspecified amount of time -- there's no law or predictability in that, there's just the whim of the tyrant.

You can recover from a bad law and a bad economy. I don't know that there's any coming back from the wholesale destruction of the bedrock principles of civilization -- at least not in a people supine for such infractions.

Update: Meanwhile, The Formerly Grey Lady reports as breaking news  --the product of new analysis!-- what critics of Obamacare said all along. New Health Law Frustrates Many In Middle Class (if by "frustrates" they mean "royally screws")