Conservative commentator Mark Steyn says that President Obama’s Thursday press conference proposing an Obamacare “fix” was underwhelming, and that Obamacare’s disastrous rollout stems from the fact that he never ran anything prior to his presidency.
“[I]t was a pitiful performance today culminating in that line ‘what we are discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy,’” Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt’s Thursday radio show. “Well, thanks a lot genius. Maybe you should have looked into that before a guy who has never done anything in his life — never run a convenience store — decides he has the awesome super powers to governmentalize one-sixth of the economy. Thanks for finally figuring out that the real world is more complicated than your faculty lounge abstractions. At some point, you know, Americans who voted for this guy — voted for a guy who has never done anything in his life and has just been wafted onwards to the next do-nothing gig before he was ever required to do anything ought to cringe under the bed in embarrassment for voting for this guy twice.”
Hewitt, author of the forthcoming book “The Happiest Life: Seven Gifts, Seven Givers, and the Secret to Genuine Success,” pointed out to Steyn that today’s move could postpone the worst of Obamacare to just before next year’s midterm elections.
“I think that’s true. I mean, he keeps using this line, oh he’s ‘only inflicting catastrophe on fewer than 5 percent of the population,” Steyn said. “That’s because he unilaterally decided to suspend the employer mandate for a year. Otherwise, a lot of spouses and children, for example just to take the most obvious thing, would be getting kicked off employer-based plans round about now. Now obviously this is unbecoming to a republic, to any kind of theory of responsible government. One of the indictments of George III that you excitable revolutionary colonials made was that he was arbitrarily suspending laws that had been passed and refusing to implement them according to his regal whims. Obama, having wrecked people’s lives by forcing insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. I don’t even think that’s doable, but if it were doable then this would no longer be a free society.”
Hewitt asked Steyn if this sequence of events regarding the Obamacare rollout would lead some people to stop trusting Democrats. According to Steyn, it should be lesson to everyone that passing bills that lawmakers haven’t read is not a good way to legislate.