Missouri Voters Resoundly Reject Obamacare :: Political News and commentaries

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August 4, 2010

Missouri Voters Resoundly Reject Obamacare

Missouri voters sent Barack Obama and the Democrats in Washington a loud and clear message yesterday by voting no to Obamacare's mandate:

About 71 percent of Missouri voters backed a ballot measure, Proposition C, that would prohibit the government from requiring people to have health insurance or from penalizing them for not having it.

The Missouri law conflicts with a federal requirement that most people have health insurance or face penalties starting in 2014.

Tuesday's vote was seen as largely symbolic because federal law generally trumps state law. But it was also seen as a sign of growing voter disillusionment with federal policies and a show of strength by conservatives and the tea party movement.

"To us, it symbolized everything," said Annette Read, a tea party participant from suburban St. Louis who quit her online retail job to lead a yearlong campaign for the Missouri ballot measure. "The entire frustration in the country ... how our government has misspent, how they haven't listened to the people, this measure in general encompassed all of that."

Okay, so it's a symbolic vote, but the message is clear. Voters in the very heart of America are saying no to Obamacare - and with it, no to Barack Obama's ideological zeal to transform America. And they're saying it less than 100 days before midterm elections. As the tea party participant quoted in the article suggests, people are frustrated with Obama's policies and his utter blindness to what the American people want.

And as for Obamacare itself, people have good reason to reject it. As Kevin Hassett's column at Bloomberg today makes abundantly clear (via Hadley Heath), after taking the time to examine the real effects of Obamacare one learns that rather than simplifying our lives and making insurance more affordable and accessible, Obamacare makes government far bigger and much more complicated.

According to Hassett:

The new law creates 68 grant programs, 47 bureaucratic entities, 29 demonstration or pilot programs, six regulatory systems, six compliance standards and two entitlements.

And on top of all this, the reform isn't even going to do what it was intended to do in the first place - it will not make health care more affordable and accessible for everyone.

Based on the administration's own numbers, as many as 117 million people might have to change their health plans by 2013 as their employer-provided coverage loses its grandfathered status and becomes subject to the new Obamacare mandates.

Hassett goes on to explain that the approximately 16 million people who will now be enrolled in Medicaid (and not necessarily of their own free will) will have their insurance financed by cuts made to the Medicare Advantage program:

To pay for this expansion, the bill takes $529 billion from Medicare, with roughly 39 percent of the cut coming from the Medicare Advantage program. This represents a large transfer of resources, sacrificing the care of the elderly in order to increase the Medicaid rolls.

In other words, we're going to take $529 billion from Medicare, and another additional $569 billion from taxpayers to create 47 new bureaucratic entities and simultaneously take 117 million people off of their current insurance plans. Make sense? Only to Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

The American people aren't aren't stupid - they recognize a pig in a poke when they see one.

Related video: OBAMACARE DEFEATED - Prop C Passes in Missouri by 70% :