Nobody listened to the Arizona singalong frog about Obamacare. (employment, healthcare, insurance)

[revelated]

And yes, I know the frog was singing about immigration. But his message can be applied to any failure to read bills.

Obamacare was known and rushed through years ago, during Obama's first reign. At that time, my auditor sense tingled, and I called out the fact that people were not reading the bill and Obama's Administration did everything in their power to sneak it through the pipes without proper oversight. It wasn't really until the second reign that the Republicans and Tea Partiers started to be skeptical of the bill, especially since it was too overreaching.

Remember that fee that the IRS would charge you if you didn't carry insurance? Remember when Obama said that it isn't a tax, despite plain black letter in the bill calling it an excise tax? Remember later, the people trying to get Obamacare stopped as a violation of rights and an undue burden by applying a new tax, and Obama's campaign promises not to implement any new taxes on, or raise the tax burden of, the middle class?

In the second term, a judge decided that there was no precedent for stopping the law, since there was a way to avoid the tax (have insurance). This despite the fact that buying insurance would obviously be more expensive than just paying the tax. That's been since confirmed. It's an extortion to force people to pay money into the government regardless of

What people still doubted, and Obama's smooth tongue was partly to blame, was whether people would have their policies cancelled. But when Obama claimed that you wouldn't lose your existing coverage, you can blame the teleprompter, for missing out on necessary caveats.

- When he said you can keep your policy, he didn't lie. He missed out on the important caveat that it only applied to coverage that you were provided through a place of employment. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, except that those who are already covered through employment, won't benefit from Obamacare and never would have.

- When he said that the goal was to make sure people don't get a free ride if they get hurt or sick, he didn't lie. He missed out on the important caveat that the providers have no way of knowing what type of care you'll need; as such, they are forced to give you protections that you may never need (i.e. maternity coverage for a woman who can never bear children). The bill failed to address the concept of minimum coverage properly; it should be defined as addressing the needs of the lowest common denominator, not the greatest common multiple.

- When he said that healthcare should be affordable, he didn't lie. He missed out on the important caveat that the affordability would not be relative to the amount of income a person had. As a result in some cases it ends up cheaper to pay the tax each year rather than keep care. Yes, there's a risk of them getting sick, but if they were in reasonably good shape, they had little to worry about.

So what am I getting at? I'm saying that Obama was voted in for a second term despite fundamental issues with the black letter of the bill. People supported him despite many studies and specialists that called out these issues well in advance. Obama went so far as to jeopardize the state of the country's economy to get it passed and done, because he knew the Republicans would back down.

Now one could argue that a lot of these were oversights. I don't buy that.
Some might say that the website problems are happenstance. I don't buy that either.

I firmly believe Obama knew exactly what would happen, but he was too arrogant to back down.