Obamacare: Holding Medicare Hostage

Political thuggery: The Obamacarians are threatening that Medicare will collapse in chaos if Obamacare is declared unconstitutional. From the AP story:

Medicare’s payment system, the unseen but vital network that handles 100 million monthly claims, could freeze up if President Barack Obama’s health care law is summarily overturned, the administration has quietly informed the courts. Although Obama’s overhaul made significant cuts to providers and improved prescription and preventive benefits, Medicare was overlooked in Supreme Court arguments that focused on the law’s controversial requirement that individuals carry health insurance.

Yet havoc for Medicare could have repercussions as both parties avidly court seniors in this election year and as hospitals and doctors increasingly complain the program doesn’t pay enough. In papers filed with the Supreme Court, administration lawyers have warned of  “extraordinary disruption” if Medicare is forced to unwind countless transactions that are based on payment changes required by more than 20 separate sections of the Affordable Care Act.

Never give in to blackmail.

Besides, I doubt it.  The law isn’t fully up and running  yet, and moreover, Congress could pass a law easing the transition or maintaining new methods if those are better than the old.  Besides, why couldn’t the the old procedures be restored? And don’t forget, the death of Obamacare would restore the $500 billion stripped from Medicare to make the law seem falsely economically responsible.

But consider: Obama and his ideological supporters want turn the USA into a bureaucratic state like the EU, in which technocrats and “experts” rule over society.  Obamacare is a big step in that direction. So, if they have used the bureaucracy to tie everything in knots as a mutually assured destruction tactic to prevent the beast from being killed, it was precisely because they want to prevent the majority who oppose this awful law from ever untangling ourselves.

But if there would be disruption, better now when it will be less disruptive, than later when the spider will have spun an inescapable web of anti-democratic power and bureaucratic fiats. Obamacare must go.