Buffoonery: Reid: U.S. Needs Single Payer National Health Care | Obama Explains Why He Can Ignore His Health-Care Law

There was some unusual candor from one of the chief architects of Obamacare at the end of last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). According to the Las Vegas Sun, 'In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges. But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans, and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot. Reid said he thinks the country has to ‘work our way past’ insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program ‘Nevada Week in Review.’ ‘What we've done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,’ Reid said."

"When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: ‘Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.’ The idea of introducing a single-payer national health care system to the United States, or even just a public option, sent lawmakers into a tizzy back in 2009, when Reid was negotiating the health care bill. ‘We had a real good run at the public option … don’t think we didn't have a tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system,’ Reid said on the PBS program, recalling how then-Sen. Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the idea of a public option made them abandon the notion and start from scratch."

So despite ridicule aimed at Republicans for suggesting Obamacare’s regulation of 1/6th of the economy was just a precursor to Democrats’ desire to eventually have the government run it completely, Harry Reid has now admitted that Republicans were correct all along. Of course, given then train wreck that Obamacare has (predictably) turned into, the idea of having the government take over the remaining aspects of the health care sector should give Americans nightmares.

Meanwhile, Democrats don’t seem to want to follow the law they already wrote and passed over the vociferous objections of Republicans and the American public. In a must-read editorial from Saturday, The Wall Street Journal writes, "President Obama left town for Martha's Vineyard on Friday, but not before holding a late-afternoon press conference that explained a lot about his governing philosophy, and not in a good way. A reporter asked the President about his decision to delay for one year the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate for businesses, in violation of the law's legally effective date. Mr. Obama replied that ‘in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know what? This is a tweak that doesn't go to the essence of the law. . . . That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do, but we're not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to, quote-unquote, ObamaCare.’ He blamed his need to act unilaterally on Republicans for their ‘ideological fixation.’ Which is weird, because the House passed a bill on July 17 giving him that specific power. In fact, 229 Republicans and 35 Democrats passed the Authority for Mandate Delay Act, sponsored by Tim Griffin of Arkansas. Mr. Obama knows this because before the vote the White House issued a formal veto threat saying it ‘strongly opposes’ H.R. 2667 and calling it ‘unnecessary.'"

So, if the president was actually interested in codifying his delay of the employer mandate, the Senate could take up the bill and pass it. But Senate Democrats have made no move to do so yet. Not only that, when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell tried to get consent to pass a companion House-passed measure to delay Obamacare’s individual mandate as well, Reid objected.

The WSJ editors add, “Speaking of normal political environments and ideological fixations, until ObamaCare one party had not rushed through a new entitlement on a straight partisan vote over mass public condemnation. The Democratic rush to do so has led to many technical mistakes and failures, and the authors of such a bill are not then entitled to lecture the other party about fixing the problems their law created. In his Friday remarks, Mr. Obama also claimed that he had the ‘executive authority’ for the mandate delay. But if he really believes that, then why did he say he would normally ask for a legislative ‘tweak.’ Either the fix requires legislation or it doesn't.”

President Obama needs to make clear whether he believes his delay of the employer mandate requires authorization from Congress or not and whether he’s for or against such a bill now that the House has passed one. If he’s actually for it, then he needs to “call Senate Democrats and persuade them to pass that bill” as the WSJ editors say. If he opposes it, as his veto message said, why does he think the president gets to pick and choose which laws he enforces and why does he oppose Congressional approval of a policy he’s ordered his administration to carry out?

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