WE’RE A BANANA REPUBLIC WITH A CAUDILLO PRESIDENCY

All of us screw up from time to time.  But it’s hard to imagine how anyone else could screw up anything else as badly as Obama and the Democrats have screwed up health care.

The purpose of Obamacare was to provide health insurance for those who don’t have it, they told us.  But more than 30 million Americans still will be uninsured in 2024, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

And thanks to Obamacare, there will be 2.5 million fewer full time jobs, CBO says.  Democrats had said Obamacare will add 4 million jobs.

So far, millions more have lost their health insurance than gained coverage.  This year and next, up to 93 million more could lose theirs, the Department of Health and Human Services estimated.

Obamacare will make health care more affordable, Democrats said.

Obamacare will cost taxpayers $2 trillion over the decade, CBO estimates.  It’ll raise the cost of individual policies this year by an average of 32 percent, said the Society of Actuaries.

Premiums for employees of Simonetta’s Collision and Car Care in McKeesport, Pennsylvania will rise 32 to 100 percent.

In Maryland, premiums for small groups (2 to 50 people) will rise between 23 percent and 46 percent.

Nearly 17,000 government employees in South Carolina face triple digit increases.  Family plans for state and local government workers there will go up by an average of 32 percent.

"If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period," President Barack Obama promised.

Unless you actually need your doctor.

Sick children are being denied specialty care because of Obamacare, KING-TV in Seattle reported Jan. 31. Ellie Porter, 6, of Kaysville, Utah, was three and a half months into a treatment program for cancer when her health insurance was cancelled. 

Dozens of adult cancer patients have lost their doctors.  Thousands more will, because Obamacare "contains provisions that directly target patients with cancer because their care is perceived as costly," Dr. Scott Gottlieb wrote in Forbes.

Patients must wait longer to see a doctor, and for treatment in a hospital emergency room.

The Obamacare tax on medical devices will stifle innovation in health care, cost 43,000 jobs, an industry trade group says.

Because it’s so poorly designed, the Obamacare web site is a happy hunting ground for identity thieves, cyber security experts say.  Most identity theft in the U.S. is medical related.

Some of the code for Healthcare.gov was written by programmers in Belarus.  U.S. intelligence agencies suspect they may have inserted "malicious code" that could be used for cyber attacks or identity theft.

HHS made mistakes while processing the applications of tens of thousands of people who signed up on Healthcare.gov, but doesn’t know how to correct them.

Democrats may have believed Obamacare would do the things they promised when they rammed it through in the middle of the night of March 21, 2010. But it’s clear now it does much more harm than good.

Which President Obama in effect acknowledged Tuesday (2/11) when he said he’ll put off until 2016 enforcement of the "employer mandate" for small businesses with 99 or fewer employees.  This is the 27th time he’s unilaterally delayed a provision of the law, which he has no legal authority to do.

So much for the Democrat claim Obamacare is "settled law."

This is banana republic stuff, for which he ought to be impeached.  No president has the right to cherry pick what laws – or portions of laws – he’ll enforce, or to say some Americans needn’t obey them.

But as a caudillo, Mr. Obama is less Hugo Chavez, more Fielding Mellish, the Woody Allen character in "Bananas."  With each imperial ukase, he dismantles more of his "signature legislative achievement."

Ron Fournier of the National Journal, heretofore an Obamacare supporter, is disgusted by so obvious a ploy to postpone until after the midterm elections the job killing consequences of the employer mandate.

"It’s getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act," he said.

"This delay is going to set people off more than the others," said Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for TIME and MSNBC.  It "screams of politics without an alternative explanation."

It’s more likely to hurt than help because  "it puts Obamacare and its failures front and center," and "it puts red-state Democrats in the hot seat again," said Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin.

"Whatever moves the White House makes to rescue Obamacare from utter disaster simply perpetuate the impression that the law is a mess," she said.

"ObamaCare is unraveling like a cheap sweater," said Jonathan Tobin of Commentary magazine.  "The sheer number of ObamaCare exemptions and delays has grown to the point where it is no longer possible to pretend that the only problem with the law was a glitch-ridden website.

"With ObamaCare enrollment numbers already falling millions short of what they would have to be for the law to be cost-effective, no amount of playing fast and loose with enforcement can disguise the fact that the scheme appears to be headed for collapse."

It should mean the collapse of America’s caudillo presidency.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette