Why didn’t CNN report on this in 2010, when the vote happened? Oh well, better late than never.

Excerpt:

Senate Democrats voted unanimously three years ago to support the Obamacare rule that is largely responsible for some of the health insurance cancellation letters that are going out.

In September 2010, Senate Republicans brought a resolution to the floor to block implementation of the grandfather rule, warning that it would result in canceled policies and violate President Barack Obama’s promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it.

“The District of Columbia is an island surrounded by reality. Only in the District of Columbia could you get away with telling the people if you like what you have you can keep it, and then pass regulations six months later that do just the opposite and figure that people are going to ignore it. But common sense is eventually going to prevail in this town and common sense is going to have to prevail on this piece of legislation as well,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said at the time.

“The administration’s own regulations prove this is not the case. Under the grandfathering regulation, according to the White House’s own economic impact analysis, as many as 69 percent of businesses will lose their grandfathered status by 2013 and be forced to buy government-approved plans,” the Iowa Republican said.

On a party line vote, Democrats killed the resolution, which could come back to haunt vulnerable Democrats up for re-election this year.

So those evil Republicans were actually trying to protect the American people from losing their health insurance, but the Democrats stopped them. This reminds me of when Bush was trying to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ahead of the housing crisis, and the Democrats blocked him because they claimed there was no mortgage lending crisis. Then later, they claimed that the mortgage lending crisis was caused by insufficient regulation.

Here is economist Larry Kudlow of CNBC to make sense of these policies at a higher level.

Excerpt:

Charles Krauthammer and the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger noted in excellent recent columns that this whole Obamacare business represents the greatest-ever expansion of the liberal entitlement-state dream. But I don’t want that dream. And you shouldn’t either.

Here’s what else I don’t want: As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don’t want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments or Viagra. I don’t want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibles, and with services I don’t need or want?

Why? Because Team Obama says I have to. And that’s not much of a reason. It’s not freedom.

It’s especially not freedom for thirty-something chaste single males like me. I don’t want it, I don’t need it, and if you force me to pay for it for other people, then don’t expect me to marry and have children, because I can’t afford to pay for the wards of the welfare state and a family. It has to be one or the other. Either I keep what I earn, or the government takes what I earn. Period.

So far I am exempt from this, but my turn is coming next year, as Kudlow notes:

Incidentally, equally punitive regulations will hit more than 90 million employer-sponsored health plans next year. It’s the same problem as the individual plan. Grandfathering won’t work. Moreover, replacing these plans with much more expensive products will constitute a major tax hike on the entire economy. This point shouldn’t be lost as Americans worry about being kicked from their plans. Obamacare is not only anti-freedom but anti-growth.

I had not read the Daniel Henninger column linked above before, but here’s a sobering snippet from that column:

What made ObamaCare an exemplar of progressive politics and policy is precisely what has been on view this week in news stories and the Sebelius hearing. It’s not that the health program was to be administered by the state or that it promised benefits to all. Liberalism did that for decades. What made it peculiarly progressive were themandates. And not just the law’s individual and business mandates to purchase their insurance. The essence of modern Democratic progressivism is: “You will participate in what we have created for you, and you will comply with the law’s demands.”

[…]American progressivism is politics by cramdown. Ask Jamie Dimon. Ask the coal miners the EPA is putting out of business. Ask the union workers waiting for jobs on the Keystone XL pipeline. Ask Boeing in South Carolina or the harmless tea party groups from towns no one has ever heard of that were shut down by the IRS, or the 20,000 inner-city parents and students who marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest obliteration of their charter schools by New York’s progressive mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio.

I had blogged before about the Charles Krauthammer column that Kudlow mentioned. Check it out if you missed it.

This column from Investors Business Daily is a must-read. It’s by respected moderate conservative Charles Krauthammer. In it, he explains why Obama lied about people being able to keep their existing plans.

Krauthammer explains:

ObamaCare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy.

Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges.

Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage.

[…]Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan, explained Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea.

Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is canceled.

Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy 28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for bells and whistles for which he has no use.

[…]As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles aren’t just there to festoon the health care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people.

ObamaCare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.

So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it.

And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge.

That’s the point I really wanted to get clear – the paternalism and the redistribution of wealth. I don’t need any of the new required minimum coverages every health insurance plan must now have. It won’t make my coverage “better” if I have coverage for things like pregnancies and mammograms and drug addiction counseling and contraceptives and abortions and sex changes and breast implants and in vitro fertilization and tobacco cessation. I don’t need those things because I don’t have that lifestyle. But I’ll have to pay more for health insurance, so that other people can have those things. And those other people will be voting Democrat in 2014. That’s what this is really about. The Democrats can’t raise taxes to buy votes, but they buy votes in other ways – by redistributing wealth under the rubric of “health care”. We often hear a lot of complaints that men don’t want to marry and have children, but maybe that’s because so many people keep voting to waste the money they earn on other things.

Some good news

One interesting piece of news did come out that might help to reverse this mess. Although the administration is saying now that it has no idea how many plans were sold, it turns out that this is another lie. CBS News reports that in the first three days of Obamacare being activated, less than 300 policies were sold.

Excerpt:

For 31 days now, the Obama administration has been telling us that Americans by the millions are visiting the new health insurance website, despite all its problems.

But no one in the administration has been willing to tell us how many policies have been purchased, and this may be the reason: CBS News has learned enrollments got off to an incredibly slow start.

Early enrollment figures are contained in notes from twice-a-day “war room” meetings convened within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website failed on Oct. 1. They were turned over in response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee.

The website launched on a Tuesday. Publicly, the government said there were 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours. But at a meeting Wednesday morning, the war room notes say “six enrollments have occurred so far.”

They were with BlueCross BlueShield North Carolina and Kansas City, CareSource and Healthcare Service Corporation.

By Wednesday afternoon, enrollments were up to “approximately 100.” By the end of Wednesday, the notes reflect “248 enrollments” nationwide.

The health care exchanges need to average 39,000 enrollees a day to meet the goal of seven million by March 1.

It doesn’t sound like they are going to make their target. If Obamacare fails fast and fails loud, then we might be able to do something about it in the 2014 elections. But we would need people to stop listening to the blaming coming from the President and stop listening to the liberal media and start thinking about what is really going on.