Media Scrutiny Of Obamacare Is Downright Excessive
Lately, every newscast opens with the Healthcare.gov website “disaster.”No newscast seems able to resist relishing in the difficulties the Obama Administration has experienced with the launch of the website. The costs of the site have been conflated by over $534 million, as if this president regularly spends with the reckless abandon of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Not once this week have I heard anyone mention that the 40+ Obamacare repeal votes have cost American taxpayers a grand total of $54 million.
It seems as if so many in the media are just waiting for the first black president to flub up and each news outlet wants to make sure they are the first to point out any and all missteps. CNN even has an Obamacare website navigation clock which replaced the Debt Ceiling Deadline and Government Shutdown Clock, designed to magnify the inefficiencies of the site. How dare there be problems with a website designed to coordinate fifty states with thousands of insurance companies!
No one is denying the problems the website has had. But remember, it’s a website, it is not the entire system. It will be fixed. But seldom do we hear of the preexisting conditions that have been eliminated by the revolutionary program. Seldom do we recall three-fourths of the medical bankruptcies (which account for 60% of all bankruptcies in the U.S.) were filed by those with insurance. Seldom does anyone interview one of the thousands of Americans that have benefited from the Affordable Care Act. Why is that? Perhaps because the media gave a pass to George W. Bush; as expectations were so low of this man of very mediocre intelligence? The Bush-Era Tax Cuts received a fraction of the negative press the Obamacare website has received upon their onset in 2002. By comparison, there was a significantly greater outrage expressed when President Obama extended the Tax Cuts in 2010. In order to renew jobless benefits during the holidays, the President was put between a rock and a hard place much to the dismay of many of us Americans, especially those of us who are fiscally literate. Unfortunately, the decisions of the Commander in Chief are not always black and white, especially where millions of vulnerable Americans are concerned.
It doesn’t seem to matter how excessive the expenditures of the previous administration were, nor what the GOP Teaparty-controlled Congress incurs. The Bush-Era Tax Cuts amounted to $1.8 trillion that we will never see again. The recent shutdown cost taxpayers around $24 billion according to Standard and Poors estimates, but the blame on the Ted Cruz-led Teaparty was minimal by comparison to the harsh critique levied upon Kathleen Sebelius and the President over a website. Tomorrow we will see unprecedented scrutiny of our Health and Human Services Secretary during the hearings because, apparently, this is the greatest scandal to befall us in our nation’s history.
