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Hope 'n' Change: The Planned Failure of ObamaCare

In a rare press conference Friday (August 9, 2013), Barack Obama again defended his crumbling and unpopular health care law, boasting of a handful of goodies in it that people will supposedly enjoy. Those include insurance for "children" up to age 26 under their parents' plan, rebates for unspent premium money, subsidies for those who can't afford insurance (subsidies no longer to be verified against income) and don't forget "free preventive care, mammograms [and] contraception." Ah yes -- "free." Predictably, Obama blamed the GOP for the law's failures, because, "The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care."

Actually, according to the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare itself ensures that 30 million people won't have health care. Oops.

The list of problems with the law's implementation only gets longer, too. As we've previously noted, Obama unilaterally delayed the mandate that employers provide health insurance to employees. "I didn't simply choose to delay this on my own," he insisted Friday. "This was in consultation with businesses all across the country." Oh, he gained constitutional authority for delaying enforcement of part of a law after "consultation with businesses." We didn't realize that's how presidential authority was secured, but we imagine if a Republican is elected in 2016, he'll quickly gain support from businesses for scrapping the whole law.

Next, individuals are supposed to be able to buy health insurance over state exchanges on the Internet, similar to Expedia or other travel sites. But development is behind schedule meaning that critical security testing won't begin in a "beta" phase with a few users -- it will happen on opening day for everyone.

Likewise, training for the "navigators" who will help people sign up for these exchanges is not going well. Just three weeks ago, the administration said that 30 hours of training would be sufficient for these people to understand the monstrously complex law, but now they say 20 hours will suffice. We wonder if their training will be anything like what IRS agents received before the 2012 election -- how to delay and frustrate political opponents. Indeed, they'll have access to citizens' sensitive health records, and the order has already gone out to charitable hospitals that treat uninsured people.

Despite all this, James Clyburn (R-SC) boasted, "The fact of the matter is, [Democrats] will be running on ObamaCare in 2014. In fact, we set it up to run on it in 2014."

They may run on it as-is for now, but their real goal is a single-payer government system. Hence the planned shortcomings of the current plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave away the game, saying, "Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes," we will eventually scrap an insurance-based health system. "What we've done with ObamaCare is have a step in the right direction, but we're far from having something that's going to work forever," he said. "Don't think we didn't have a tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system."

Conservatives must keep up the fight.