Redstate
ObamaCare is greed sanctified through politics
By John Hayward
October 22nd, 2013

Money gets a bad rap from some people, because it’s supposed to be the instrument of greed. Wanting more money is said to be crass. Indeed, in our modern political culture, wanting to keep your own money is treated as “greed.” The noble and virtuous demands of the collective, as interpreted by a priesthood of politicians, completely trumps individual self-interest.

But it’s easy to be greedy without demanding money. The ObamaCare debate provides a great example of this. We are incessantly told that the needs of the people President Obama believes will benefit from his health-care scheme outweigh the needs of everyone else. The relative size of these two groups doesn’t change argument, even when Obama tacitly admits – as he did during his speech yesterday – that only 15 percent or less of the populace stands to benefit from the program. Higher premiums, exploding out-of-pocket costs, lost coverage, and enormous levels of inconvenience visited upon the rest of us are of absolutely zero concern to the President. He didn’t even mention those people in his speech. He never does. He has nothing to say to them, and evidently no one in the mainstream media intends to ask tough questions on their behalf.

The President’s political team is having a very hard time finding any happy ObamaCare purchasers – none of his human props at yesterday’s Rose Garden event had actually bought a policy. This seems like a significant data point, over three weeks into the launch of a multi-trillion-dollar program with a $500 million website whose use is mandated upon a formerly free population by law, with the IRS standing by to enforce stiff fines against the disobedient.

But let us stipulate that some happy customers will eventually come forward and declare themselves happy with the cost, deductible, benefits, and restrictions of the policies they have purchased. Why is their satisfaction supposed to completely outweigh the higher prices and poor service encountered by millions of others? Are they not greedy for insisting on benefits for themselves, without concern for the price paid by others? They’re pursuing their own naked self-interest in a way that damages the lives of other people, and they’re worse than most of the people liberal culture routinely characterizes as greedy or selfish, because they are using huge amounts of compulsive force to get what they want. Nobody on the fuzzy end of this lollipop is allowed to say “no.”

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