Curse of Cassandra

“The Matrix … is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Morpheus

Language is a means by which we express ourselves, yet more recently it has become a focus of forces of disinformation to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people’s thought processes.  The Nixon administration, responding to heavy lobbying by the beef industry, changed the definition of what constituted “sirloin steak.”  They boasted that this would help consumers by lowering the price of this prized steak, which it did. What they did not tell the public was that what used to be called “rump steak” disappeared as it was now defined as “sirloin” and sold as such.

That administration also was the one that first gave us the term “stonewalling,” meaning to answer without answering; a technique now perfected by politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes whereby they pretend politely to answer pointed questions, but as an honest answer would reveal a truth that they do not want us to see they instead answer a question that they wished had been asked.  Witness a House Education and Labor Committee hearing from June 23, 2009 where Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, a Republican who is also a physician, was questioning Christina Romer, then chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers regarding whether under ObamaCare people would be able to keep a plan that they were happy with:

Price:  You also mentioned, as other folks have, that the president’s goal–and it’s reiterated over and over and over–that if you like your current plan or if you like your current doctor, you can keep them.  Do you know where that is in the bill?

Romer:  Absolutely.  And things like the employer mandate is part of making sure that large employers that today–the vast majority of them do provide health insurance. One of the things that’s–

Price: I’m asking about if an individual likes their current plan and maybe they don’t get it through their employer and maybe in fact their plan doesn’t comply with every parameter of the current draft bill, how are they going to be able to keep that?

Romer:  So the president is fundamentally talking about maintaining what’s good about the system that we have.  And–

Price:  That’s not my question.

Romer:  One of the things that he has been saying is, for example, you may like your plan and one of the things we may do is slow the growth rate of the cost of your plan, right?  So that’s something that is not only–

Price:  The question is whether or not patients are going to be able to keep their plan if they like it.  What if, for example, there’s an employer out there–and you’ve said that if the employers that already provide health insurance, health coverage for their employees, that they’ll be just fine, right?  What if the policy that those employees and that employer like and provide for their employees doesn’t comply with the specifics of the bill?  Will they be able to keep that one?

Romer:  So certainly my understanding–and I won’t pretend to be an expert in the bill–but certainly I think what’s being planned is, for example, for plans in the exchange to have a minimum level of benefits.

Price:  So if I were to tell you that in the bill it says that if a plan doesn’t comply with the specifics that are outlined in the bill that that employer’s going to have to move to the–to a different plan within five years–would you — would that be unusual, or would that seem outrageous to you?

Romer:  I think the crucial thing is, what kind of changes are we talking about?  The president was saying he wanted the American people to know that fundamentally if you like what you have it will still be there.

Price:  What if you like what you have, Dr. Romer, though, and it doesn’t fit with the definition in the bill?  My reading of the bill is that you can’t keep that.

Romer:  I think the crucial thing–the bill is talking about setting a minimum standard of what can count–

Price:  So it’s possible that you may like what you have, but you may not be able to keep it?  Right?

Romer:  We’d have–I’d have to look at the specifics.

Now, in this fall of 2013, the Obama administration wants us to believe it was acting properly because the president was “essentially” seeking only to eliminate from the health care marketplace health plans that were in actuality abusing the public because they were “substandard.”  Their goal, so they said, was simply to require that the health care industry give us “better health care coverage.”

Simply stated, the use of the term “substandard” is a clever, intentional lie that was chosen because, also being a pejorative term, it leads the listener to believe that the administration was only seeking to banish a market abuse.  Note how this term has been picked up by most of the press and by both, major parties.  But let us parse the term.

“Sub-standard” literally means what is below a given standard.  So what was the “standard?”  For individuals and for companies providing health insurance coverage for their employees, the standard was the coverage they would like to have commensurate with price.  This obviously means that the “standard” will vary from individual to individual and from company to company.  It is a reflection of the notion of freedom of choice, a tenet upon which this country was built.  The Obama administration, however, found such a state of affairs unacceptable and believed that what would be better for society as a whole would be if individual preferences were made subservient to its plan for our society, so it set one, single standard for the entire country and got the democratically controlled Congress in lock step to adopt it.  This law then outlawed perfectly excellent policies which were branded the “untermenschen” of the health care industry.

However the moniker “substandard” was adopted to hide a more insidious truth, one that became apparent when Obama was forced to run for cover and declared that he would change his mind and let those happy with their substandard policies keep them.  Within a few days, and after a private meeting with Obama, both the insurance industry and their state regulators patiently explained that it is now impossible for them to offer the policies that had been cancelled.  The reason for such impossibility is that unchanged from ObamaCare is its central individual mandate requirement.  That is, ObamaCare seeks to fund both the subsidies that it authorizes and the coverage for the highest risk enrollees (those who are medically uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions) by mandating a compulsory list of gold-plated benefits and conscripting wealthier and healthy individuals who would never purchase such a policy to make overpayments.

In other words, the use of the term “substandard” is used to blind the electorate from the truth that ObamaCare is in reality a pure income redistribution scheme and always was intended to be so.

If you are ready to unplug yourself from the seductive matrix of Obama’s words, in the words of Morpheus……………. “welcome….to the real world.”

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