George Will made a marvelous observation Sunday about the so-called Affordable Care Act.
Appearing on ABC's This Week, Will said, "What Obamacare requires for it to work - mass irrationality, both on the part of employers to ignore that incentive and on the part of young people who are supposed to pay 3, 4, 5 times more for health insurance than it would cost them to just pay the fine and ignore it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
JONATHAN KARL, SUBSTITUTE HOST: George, the real big political story this week was a significant setback for the White House on the health care law. Delaying the implementation of the employer mandate that requires all companies over 50 employees to provide health care. How big a setback? What's going on?
GEORGE WILL: They're changing the law. We have a Treasury Secretary, we have three Deputy Treasury Secretaries, underneath whom there are 12 Assistant Secretaries. Late Tuesday afternoon they sent out one of the 12. Didn't send him out, he did a web posting. It said by the way, the law passed by Congress that makes no provision for waiving this, shall be waived.
KARL: By the way they did this while the entire White House Press Corps from Tanzania on a 20 hour a flight. But anyway.
WILL: Here's the problem. In addition to the fact that Obamacare is hideously complicated, Rube Goldberg contraption, beyond that, it puts in place perverse incentives. The employer mandate says if you have 50 or more full-time employees and until Congress changes this, which it will, it defines full-time employees as 30 hours a week, you have to pay a substantial sum for each of their health care.
Now, the employers not being dummies have said, well let's have fewer employers and make many of the employees we have part-time employees.
KARL: Working 29-1/2 hours.
WILL: What Obamacare requires for it to work - mass irrationality, both on the part of employers to ignore that incentive and on the part of young people who are supposed to pay 3, 4, 5 times more for health insurance than it would cost them to just pay the fine and ignore it.
Indeed.
The reality is there's so much about this legislation that totally defies logic. If we had an honest media, the public would have known this prior to its enactment and it never would have passed.
But instead of acting like journalists while the bill was being debated, Obama's media did everything in their power to assist the administration's misinformation campaign.
Recall then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) infamously saying that people weren't going to really know what was in the bill until after it was passed.
Sadly she was right, and the more folks realize what ObamaCare really is, the more they oppose it.
It will be nevertheless fascinating to see if the media will actually tell the public the truth concerning problems in the legislation in the coming months or continue dishonestly backing the President.
Stay tuned.
