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Scene & Herd In San Francisco, Ver. 3.0

(If the title of this post is confusing to you, see the explanation in Version 2.0 two days ago, quoting the first one in the series from last September.)

This morning the San Francisco Chronicle has a fascinating criticism of ObamaCare. Naturally, it?s by ?a lifelong Democrat,? but that?s not surprising since there probably aren?t any Republicans in San Francisco or among the Chronicle?s readership. It shows, unwittingly, that even when Democrats get it, they don?t get it; even when they see the light they?re still in the dark.

David Kline, the author, identifies himself as self-employed and the co-author of Great Again, due in 2011 from Harvard Business Press. ?As a lifelong Democrats,? he begins his piece,

I?m accustomed to hearing Republican charges that Democrats don?t understand the needs of small business and middle-class taxpayers. Claims such as these were a frequent feature of the debate over health reform, and as always, I dismissed them as propaganda.

?Until,? he continues,

I got my first post-health-reform premium hike notice. And then learned of a hidden feature of the new health law that deliberately targets small businesses and self-employed people like myself to shoulder the cost of health reform.

Exactly one week after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed on March 23, I received a notice from Regence Blue Cross of Oregon saying that it was ?excited to introduce? certain non-negotiable changes to my family?s self-paid health insurance coverage. The premiums for my wife and two young children were going up a mind-boggling 45 percent (from $480 to $697 per month). Their benefits, meanwhile, were effectively being cut in half, thanks to the doubling of our deductibles from $500 to $1,000 each.

When you add in the cost of my own separate Regence policy (whose premiums also jumped 20 percent this year), my middle-class family with its self-employed breadwinner will now be paying $19,000 a year.

He goes on to refer to a May 26 Los Angeles Times article that reported ?that small businesses in California were seeing post-reform premium hikes of as much as 76 percent and a May 27 Business Week article noting a ?hidden health care bill surprise? that will require a mountain of new paperwork, in triplicate, from small business owners.

In other words, it would appear, the Republican (and let us not forget Independent) criticism of ObamaCare was ?propaganda? ... until it turned out to be true. But at least Kline is both perceptive and honest enough to recognize and admit that the middle class is being hit much harder by ObamaCare than his fellow Democrats have been willing to admit. ?And it does not appear,? he concludes, ?that Democratic lawmakers have the stomach to fight the insurers over premium hikes.?

Duh! Well, of course the premiums had to go up, to cover all the previously uninsured and all those with pre-existing conditions. ?The simple truth,? Kline now recognizes,

is that if the new health reform bill had passed with no protections for the uninsured ? or no protections for those with pre-existing conditions ? my fellow Democrats would have been outraged. So why, then, is it OK for health reform to leave middle-class rate payers like me with no real protection against extortionist premium hikes?

Kline, in short, wants all those formerly uninsured to be covered, and he wants all those with pre-existing conditions to be covered, but he doesn?t want to pay for it, and he doesn?t want people like him to pay for it. Like any good Democrat, he wants to appropriate the money from people he doesn?t like to provides goods and services to people he does like, all at no cost to himself.

Oh, great! Why didn?t the Democrats go after the billionaire drug companies or the predatory health insurance companies and make them pay for health reform? No, they had to stick it to small business ? the one group with no real lobbying muscle in Washington.

So I have one question for my Democratic president and Democratic legislators: Are you actually trying to prove the Republican propaganda right?

Yes, they do that every day. But for Kline propaganda remains propaganda even when it?s true.

Full post as published by Discriminations on June 18, 2010 (boomark / email).