Undoing Obamacare

"A month before President Obama signed Obama-care into law, his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, said, “I think the president remains committed to the notion that we have to have a comprehensive approach, because the pieces of the puzzle are too closely tied to one another.” She added, “Pieces of the puzzle are necessarily tied together if you have a comprehensive approach.” You might say that Obama-care aspires to be like a finely tuned watch—though it is of course a clunky, clacking, often imprecise, congressionally assembled, $2 trillion watch. But it’s comprehensive.

The predicament in which the Court finds itself is plainly a product of President Obama and his party’s preference for massive, unwieldy, impossibly complicated legislation—the kind that you have to pass first to “find out what is in it.” Such legislation, as the oral arguments revealed, does not fit within our system of limited government. That’s because, as Charles Kesler has observed, Obamacare violates the basic notion of law in a free society. Kesler writes, “Sometimes the most obvious derangements of our politics are staring us in the face but we don’t see them”—like “calling this voluminous monstrosity a bill. Can you have a bill, a single law, that is almost 3,000 pages long? In the old days, that would have constituted a whole code of laws.”

In other words, it’s not just Obamacare that must go, but rather the whole liberal and progressive notion of “comprehensive” legislation for a nation of 300 million people. Obamacare is the epitome of that confidence in central planning by experts. Whether the Court strikes down Obamacare, or President Obama is defeated and Obamacare is repealed, or the Court strikes down part of Obamacare and a new president and Congress repeal the rest, last week’s historic hearings have made one thing clearer than ever: Attempts at “comprehensive” legislation compromise the very notion of limited government, in which the people’s representatives try to accomplish attainable goals in a free society. Comprehensive legislation is what happens when you have unlimited government. It is that effort, and the attitude underlying it, that need to be repudiated—by the Court and, more important, by the voters this November." [Weekly Standard]