Obama's creative, or illegal, rule-making. Megan McArdle finds a few problems with The One's assumptions of executive privilege. I love the smell of imminent lawsuits in the morning!
Thus spake Obama. Mark Steyn wades in, and once again makes me wish that American journalistic culture could give us a whole crop of wits like him:
On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.
Obama's stumbling, bumbling, fumbling news conference. David Harsanyi was even less impressed than I was. His conclusion:
Finally, near the end of the news conference, the president made an interesting claim: Obamacare was really a choice driven by an incentive for stability, not disruption. "We chose a path that was the least disruptive," he said. Though pollsters rarely measure the importance of "stability" in American life, I think it's probably one of the most vital factors driving hostility toward Obamacare from independents and moderates. Everything about Obamacare implementation has created the perception of anarchy -- the arbitrary implementation of laws, people losing the plans they have, the way it was passed and the problems it has caused in Washington -- and this news conference only reinforced that perception.39 Democrats defy Obama. Democrat support of ObamaCare has been of crystalline purity for over three years. A defection like this was unthinkable just a couple of weeks ago ... and it could well be just the beginnings of a stampede. Oh, pass the popcorn, will ya?
Will tomorrow's medical innovations be there? Dr. Paul Hsieh is worried. So am I, because I can't think of a single government services organization that is any good at driving innovation. Post Office? Uh, no. DMV? Hell, no. How about Medicare? Not so much. But, the proponents say, DARPA brought us the Internet! Well, that's not really a good example - DARPA isn't a services organization, and it doesn't have a huge bureaucracy dedicated to keeping the status quo. Services organizations grow such bureaucracies intrinsically, and government bureaucracies end up running the joint (unlike private industry, where the shareholders always retain control)...
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