Monday, November 11, 2013

Barack Obama's Disastrous Legacy (One Part of It Anyhow)

If the act does go down, the tip of the spear may belong to Edie Littlefield Sundby, a California woman with stage-four cancer, kept in remission these past seven years by a crack team of doctors, whose services she is shortly to lose. Her op-ed, running in the Wall Street Journal, went viral on Monday, November 4, and had wide circulation over the Internet, on talk radio, and on cable TV.

“Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan,” she wrote. “For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people’s ability to control their medical coverage and they may die. I guess that’s a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that’s the point.” Chris Matthews dismissed this as a cheap, “sexy” shot at his president, but look for it to be used in 2014 against every Democrat running for office. And look for many, many more Edie Littlefield Sundbys to step forward if, as predicted, employer plans start scaling back, leaving many more millions of Americans adrift. In 2012, Obama supporters made hay with claims that Mitt Romney had caused an ex-employee’s wife to die of cancer by terminating her husband’s employment and coverage. By this standard, Obamacare will soon be a mass serial killer. How will he explain it? “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs?”

And then, there’s the lie. As lies go, “If you like your plan, you can keep it” is right up there with “I am not a crook” in the annals of presidential mendacity, and way above the Bill Clinton threshold, as other people’s lives, health, and financial arrangements were not affected by whether or not he had had “sexual relations with that woman.”


Read the rest of "The Crisis Arrives" by Noemie Emery in The Weekly Standard.