The Closing of the Presidential Mind - Part 3 - Unveiled Ignorance: Obamacare and its Roots

by Andrew Thomas

How did Obama end up in this morass? Health-care reform long has been a central focus of modern American liberalism. The high priest of American socialism who offered the substance for these policies was John Rawls, an American political philosopher. Obama absorbed his views at Harvard Law School (HLS).  

President Barack Obama’s most famous policy initiative has proved to be, arguably, his most divisive and politically damaging. ObamaCare has become at once his calling card for a high rating from liberal historians and a political albatross. As the impracticality of the system has met with the reality of consumers’ everyday needs, the administration has been forced to change the rules governing the nation’s health-care system seemingly every day. 

The legality of these edicts has been questionable at best; they ensure that the health-care sector, one-sixth of the nation’s economy, is governed by the daily caprice of the nation’s chief executive. Yet, ObamaCare is also perhaps the most intellectually revealing of the namesake president’s programs. Obama admitted early in his administration, in an interview with “60 Minutes,” he saw the risks of pushing the legislation, but went ahead anyhow. “I made the decision to go ahead and do it, and it proved as costly politically as we expected, probably actually a little more costly than we expected politically,” he acknowledged. Indeed, so intent was he to push ObamaCare that he was willing to brazenly promise the public, not once but twice, in a 2009 speech to Congress that his plan would not affect Americans’ health-care options—a promise now infamously broken.  

How did Obama end up in this morass? Health-care reform long has been a central focus of modern American liberalism. The high priest of American socialism who offered the substance for these policies was John Rawls, an American political philosopher. Obama absorbed his views at Harvard Law School (HLS).

Read the rest of the article at the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research