On-No-Bamacare!
October 26, 2013
By Congressman Raul Labrador

It’s just one thing after another. The Obamacare rollout keeps getting worse and worse. The website is so dysfunctional ninety-nine percent of applications aren’t being processed. When President Obama finally acknowledged the problem – three weeks after it started - he encouraged people to use the phone.

What happened? The phones went down. One man who finally got through spent four and half hours on the phone, and still wasn’t able to sign up!

“It’s screwed up,” Rep. Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, frankly admitted.

Under Obamacare, every American is required to buy health insurance by March 31, and if you don’t, you will be taxed.

For the first time in American history, you will be taxed if you refuse to buy something. But how is it fair to tax someone for not buying something, if they can’t buy it in the first place?

This fall, Republicans in Congress united behind the idea that we should have a one-year delay in the health insurance requirement (better known as the “individual mandate”). We wanted to repeal all of Obamacare, but we were willing to accept a one-year delay in the mandate.

The President was so opposed to this idea that he shut down the government for 16 days, rather than negotiate with us on how to fix his broken health care law.

Now that the shutdown is over, Democrats are becoming more candid about the law’s failures.

On Tuesday, one of the President’s closest allies, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), said the President should move the enrollment deadline past March 31. Why? Because, she said, it was unfair to tax people for not signing up on the website, when the website itself doesn’t work.

Needless to say, this was – and is – the Republican position. And yet, when Republicans advocated for it, they were denounced as “arsonists” and “anarchists” with “bombs strapped to [our] chests.”

This week, the Administration – for the first time – refused to rule out a delay in the individual mandate – a shift from their no-changes-no-way position during the shutdown.

Keep in mind, this is a website that cost $634 million to build, more than it cost to build Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And the Administration had more than three years to build it!

It’s simply amazing the Administration allowed the most vital component of its signature health care law to become such an unmitigated disaster. And it’s even more amazing that the Administration – even now – is playing politics with the law, rather than bend to reality.

As the reality of Obamacare intrudes ever further into our lives, opposition will continue to grow. For those who say the fight is over, and the cause is lost, I say, “We have only begun to fight!”