Still, many are frustrated at being forced to give up the plans they have now. They frequently cite assurances given by Obama that Americans could hold on to their health insurance despite the massive overhaul.
"All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it," said Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester. "I'm infuriated because I was lied to."
Supporters of the healthcare law say Obama was referring to people who are insured through their employers or through government programs such as Medicare. Still, they acknowledge the confusion and anger from individual policyholders who are being forced to change.
-------------------------------------------------------
The fact is, the 40 million who have private insurance acquired either individually or through their own small businesses are being thrown under the bus first for political reasons. They are not an afterthought, but the key target.
To really understand why, however, one must realize that the oft-stated goal of providing health insurance through ObamaCare to benefit the 30 million uninsured is just a smokescreen, as if sacrificing the one group for the other roughly represents a fair trade. The reality is that ObamaCare is specifically designed to benefit women, a key fact about the law which shows its political meaning in the context of what the Democrats name the Republican war on women and doesn't get enough attention even among conservative opponents of the law.
Employer plans will have to conform to ObamaCare guidelines later, it is true. But since they represent a much larger constituency, Obama has unilaterally and unlawfully delayed key provisions of his own law which affect them in an attempt to phase in the draconian changes to health insurance slowly until after it's too late. The last thing Obama wanted as the poorly crafted law took effect was everyone up in arms at once. Better to boil the frogs slowly, and start with the most important opposition first, which is the Tea Party, which has been the most sensitive group to Obama-inspired federal interventions in American life, beginning with opposition to the mortgage forgiveness schemes in February 2009 which gave birth to the Tea Party and culminating in mobilization efforts to oppose health insurance reform schemes in the House and Senate late that same year. When ObamaCare became a fait accompli in March 2010, all the energy went in to retributive political action, which reached its crescendo with the history-making Republican take-over of the US House in November 2010.
Since then the effete who still constitute the majority in the Republican Party have done nothing to challenge the incremental imperial assaults of the president against the powers reserved to the Congress by the constitution. Looking back at them all now, one might even say that Obama's many transgressions against the separation of powers were all calculated to inure the people to the fact of them in order to smooth the way for more of the same when he needed it the most with respect to ObamaCare. Some older Republicans like Larry Kudlow, instinctively if not self-consciously, have recoiled from this, laughably calling for all provisions of ObamaCare to take effect as scheduled in the law, in the hope that the political consequences would be so profound that Republicans would win in 2014 and be able with large majorities to overturn a presidential veto of a law scrapping ObamaCare.
Seeing more acutely the threat to their very existence, however, the Tea Party has wanted the funds to ObamaCare cut off NOW. But neither camp has exerted enough influence among Republicans as a whole even as Obama methodically racked up that impressive record of tyrannical offenses against Congressional prerogatives, from the Libyan intervention without Congressional consultation to recess appointments when Congress wasn't in recess. In the face of all that the most contemptible members of the Republican establishment like David Frum instead have gone to war against these voices within their own party, in effect helping Democrats turn up the heat on the frog pot.
In political terms, ObamaCare is a key element in the larger class war being phased in first on the constituency which primarily makes up the Tea Party, the independent-minded traditionalist Americans who fend for themselves and support themselves without help from the nanny state or from a nanny employer, people who are more likely to start businesses, get married, and pay their own way and raise their own children. In a word, what has historically been the Republican base. All the rhetoric from Democrats over the period has been aimed at the these people by design, for a political reason, in order to freeze, personalize, and polarize them, painting them in the most horrific terms as the party of violence (January 2011 Giffords shooting), racism (March 2010 protests in DC), and terrorism (government shutdown in October 2013), among other things. As usual, the complete opposite of what they are, in keeping with what we used to call liberal projection syndrome and which still shows up in inaptly named government programs like the Affordable Care Act, which will not be affordable, will provide insurance but not care, and which was passed more as a partisan assault than a traditional act of Congress.
Health insurance reform under ObamaCare, by contrast, primarily benefits women as a class, whose health care costs are by nature higher and constitute the most obvious first inequality which shows up under health insurance. ObamaCare seeks to alienate women further from their natural condition by simply decreeing that this reality no longer exists. ObamaCare first and foremost puts their premiums on an equal footing with men's, craftily supplanting men as providers of health coverage to their wives through their employer plans and masking the costs women would otherwise have to absorb by themselves if they were paying for them. And then ObamaCare does much more, paying for their maternity care, and without coverage caps, their mammograms, their birth control and abortions, their lactation services and breast pumps, and letting baby mamas everywhere keep their kids on their plans until they reach the age of 26 (their kids reach 26, not the baby mamas). In effect ObamaCare seeks to solidify women as a natural Democrat Party constituency as dependent on the Democrats who provided it as the poor are who support them now because of massively expanded social welfare transfer payments.
If ever there was a public program designed to drive a stake through the heart of the traditional family, ObamaCare is it. That's why it is striking first at the people most likely in our society to take responsibility for themselves and where the idea of the traditional family is strongest. And to the extent that many within the Republican Party sympathize more with the transformational idealisms of female equality than with the realistic conceptions taught by history and nature explains better than anything why we are where we are.
The political party the Tea Party decided to support, unfortunately, hasn't proved itself worthy of them. There's still a little time left for Republicans to prove otherwise, but it is fast running out.
