Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer continued his crusade against President Obama’s “lawless” changes to Obamacare Wednesday night, claiming that President Obama changes his signature healthcare law so much that he essentially “wakes up in the morning and decides what the law is going to be.”
Krauthammer spoke on a Fox News’ panel with The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes and The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard about the most recent Obamacare sign-up numbers and the continuing “tweaks” to the law by the White House — which now add up to almost 30 individual changes.
The White House made much of new enrollment numbers revealed Wednesday, touting 1.1 million health insurance sign-ups on the federal government’s exchange. But Krauthammer disputed the administration’s spin, noting that the law is still failing to bring in the millions of Americans who go without health insurance.
“You get this crazy paradox where the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has projected that the number of uninsured Americans in ten years will be 31 million,” he explained. “When Obama launched Obamacare in 2009, he explained that the moral imperative was because there were 30 million uninsured Americans.”
“So here we’re going to go through a complete revolution of one-sixth of the U.S. economy — the dislocation of doctors, hospital, patients and plans everywhere, including insurers — in order to achieve a result in a decade where we have essentially the same number of uninsured. So what was this all about?”
“We know that up to now that the administration has been fudging its numbers, inflating them and giving them in the best light,” he continued. “They tell us these people are enrolled. That is not so. Enrolled means paid up. All we know is — and they have to admit it in the fine print — it means selected a plan, i.e. you’ve got a plan in your shopping cart but you haven’t checked out yet.”
“And second, we don’t know what the spread is,” he added. “If it remains only a quarter of the young and the healthys, that’s ruinous.” He said that if enough young people fail to sign onto the exchanges, insurance companies will be so overwhelmed by the claims of sick and elderly people that they will be forced to seek a federal bailout.
Hayes remarked that people are confused by the myriad changes to the law, making it harder for them to make informed decisions. “And it’s not only true of individual consumers, it’s not only true of employers,” he claimed. “It’s true of members of Congress. It’s true of the staff.
“I had a conversation with somebody on Capitol Hill the other day who couldn’t explain the basics of the changes, the chronology of the changes to the employer mandate,” he said. “This is their job! This is what they do! I think the more that people are unsure about what they have to do, the less likely it is they’ll do the kind of things that the law created as incentives or disincentives.”
Krauthammer agreed. “And remember how Democrats were complaining that when Republicans were trying to overturn Obamacare it was somehow unpatriotic, because it was an attack on the law of the land,” he said. “This ‘law of the land’ doesn’t even exist! It exists in Obama’s head. It’s whatever he thinks. He wakes up in the morning and decides what the law is going to be.”
“That — as an understatement — that’s not the way the law is supposed to work,” he concluded.
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