An Anniversary to Forget

June 23rd marked the three month anniversary of the enactment of ObamaCare.  As Speaker Pelosi stated in March of this year, we would “have to pass this bill” so we could “find out what is in it.”  And we certainly have.  Over the last three months, we have found out all kinds of things about this bill – and none of them have been very good.  In fact, over the last three months it has become clear that seniors will be forced to bear the majority of the burden of this bill through dramatic cuts to Medicare; that the bill is going to cost more than originally expect, topping $1.2 trillion; and that 63 percent of Americans favor repealing the health care legislation, according to a May Rasmussen poll.

The last three months have been filled with reports and analyses that prove many of the promises made by congressional Democrats and President Obama will be broken.  We were promised by Speaker Pelosi that the health care bill would create 400,000 jobs “immediately,” yet the unemployment rate continues to hover at almost ten percent.  We were promised repeatedly by President Obama when he was running for office that he would not raise taxes on middle-class families, yet ObamaCare includes at least a dozen tax hikes that would affect them.  We were promised Executive Order 13535 would bar taxpayer funding of abortions, yet we have had no update whatsoever on the president’s efforts to implement it.  We were promised that the new health care law would lower health care costs and reduce the deficit, yet both the Congressional Budget Office and the chief actuary at the Obama Administration’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have confirmed that it will do neither.

And the most condemning broken promise of them all – earlier this month, the Obama Administration finally acknowledged that the new health care law would force some 87 million Americans to drop their current coverage.  The president’s repeated promise of “if you like it, you can keep it” was yet another one to be broken.

All of these broken promises lead to a frightening question: What’s next?  It seems each day we learn something new about this law.  When the speaker promised that the American public would “find out what was in” the health care legislation when we passed it, I don’t think that many of them expected that to be only promise about health care that hasn’t been broken.