By John F. Di Leo -
Imagine it is 1663, and you want to buy a dodo.
You are now legally allowed to buy a dodo. The Dutch, who manage the island of Mauritius as a colony, have no law against the purchase of dodos. Perhaps there once was such a law, and it’s now been suspended for a year.
If you have money, and you can find a willing seller, you can buy his dodo. You could even legally buy two. You could buy three or four. The Dutch government has just announced that it won't even try to stop you.
Want a dodo? Go ahead and buy one! Keep it as a pet, have it for dinner, we don’t care. Enjoy!
But there IS just one problem with this great and generous opportunity: There aren't any dodos left.
Dutch sailors first started visiting Mauritius in 1598, and spent the next several decades catching and eating all the dodos on Mauritius. The last reported sighting of one was in 1662. So, by 1663, there were none left.
Being "legally allowed" by the Dutch government to buy them won't change that fact. No matter how much you may want a dodo, they just aren't available. And because they’re extinct, they CAN’T be brought back.
And yet, imagine the Dutch government bending to public demand for more, and proudly trumpeting the fact that – to great fanfare – they’ve lifted the "endangered species" policy against buying them on the open market.
If it were to happen, they'd be laughed off the stage.
Why? Because by then, everybody on earth knew two things: That the dodo is extinct, and that it was the Dutch who caused it to BECOME extinct. It was their fault, darn it!
Fast forward to 2013.
The partnership of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid – during the brief two-year period when the Democrats completely controlled both Congress and the White House, illegally passed a bill specifically designed to destroy the health insurance market.
That’ s no exaggeration. It was illegally passed; the blame rests entirely with the Democratic Party, and destruction WAS the intent. There are several theories for WHY they wanted to destroy it – perhaps because national healthcare has always been a primary socialist goal, perhaps because they were catering to the muslim belief that insurance itself is immoral, perhaps because they just really think that healthcare should be one of the fundamental roles of government, perhaps because it seemed politically popular in their districts for that short window of time, perhaps because their leaders turned the screws and forced them to support it, against their better judgment.
Honestly polling the congressional delegation, if that were possible, we’d get a mix of these very different answers.
But in the end, the result of the passage of Obamacare is undeniable. It forced insurers to cancel most of their existing plans, so that their customers would have to buy new policies from the government – usually much more expensive, providing less coverage.
The bill has already killed many thousands of plans, terminating millions of families’ policies, and it will kill many million more before it's fully implemented.
By the end of the implementation period, which the Democrats are trying to push out past the next election as a desperate and brazen political ploy, virtually every private sector plan will have been destroyed, despite the many clear and endlessly repeated promises of the Democrats – especially their president – that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.” They wrote the destruction of the plans directly into the bill; the promise has been a conscious, intentional lie from the start.
So these plans have ceased to exist; BHO and his peons have destroyed them. Even though they are now offering Executive Orders or new bills to “allow” their continued purchase for another year, the bills will no longer be available for purchase. They’ve been banned. You can’t just turn an assembly line back on, in a situation like this.
The president has cordially decided to come down from Mt Olympus for a moment, for just long enough to sign an edict legalizing the plans that he has already banned, the very plans that have been on the books for three years as becoming illegal on Jan 1, 2014. He now says he won't make them illegal until Jan 1, 2015 instead. We can “keep our plans if we like them, for another year.”
But what does that do to the market? Does that REALLY make these plans available for another year, undoing the millions and millions of cancellation notices that have been sent out over the past six months?
No. It can’t. Because they've already been phased out. They are no longer economically viable for most of the insurance companies to offer.
This isn't like a lawn-mowing service that you can just hire or fire at will. Insurance plans are - by definition - dependent on a large marketplace to share the risks, costs, premiums, benefits. They are dependent on spreading these elements over the coming decades. Health insurance just doesn’t work in a one-year window that way. Nothing short of full repeal of Obamacare can solve these problems, but that's the one thing they can't bring themselves to do.
The Democratic Party, through the passage of Obamacare, has already so severely warped that marketplace, most companies that COULD offer good plans before, no longer can for just a single year.
So what is BHO's offer to legalize these plans again, however temporarily?
It's nothing. It's a hollow offer. For the most part, it's the legalization of the impossible. It's saying "you may go ahead and buy as many dodos as you want," knowing full well that all the dodos have already been rendered extinct.
The analogy with the dodo is admittedly imperfect. The dodo was rendered extinct by accident; the destruction of the private health insurance market was intentional. The dodo wasn’t a controlled political plot; Obamacare was. And the Dutch would never have been foolish enough to publicly offer the sale of a nonexistent product, nor would a majority of 17th century voters fall for it.
But still… it’s as close an analogy as I can find.
The Democrat proposal to save their political lives by offering a one-year delay in the ban on existing private insurance plans is simply a massive deceit.
It’s an effort to spread the blame. When they extend the period for a year, and the insurance companies either can’t offer the same plans again, or must charge far more for them than they did before, the Democrats intend to use that as proof that the insurance companies are the villains.
It’s all about deflecting blame from where it belongs: squarely on the head of the Democratic Party.
The entire progression of healthcare destruction, from the beginning of this administration to the present, has been nothing less than a daily parade of dishonesty writ large, as only an all-powerful statist can impose on a gullible nation.
We must pray that our citizenry has learned its lesson, and stops falling for the snake oil of the corrupt and destructive cabal in our nation’s capital.
Copyright 2013 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based international trade compliance trainer. A former county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has now been a recovering politician for sixteen years.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook and LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.
