Obamacare Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Obamacare. Here they are! All 100 of them:

The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves.
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
Republicans: 'we fought the good fight' - yeah, it woulda been worth it if we could have prevented just one poor kid from getting a free inhaler.
Bill Maher
[Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles’ worth of campaign cash – that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there’s no other explanation that makes any sense.
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
ObamaCare is, really, I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery - and it is slavery, in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government. It was never about health care; it was about control.
Ben Carson
Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.
Pete Buttigieg (Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future)
The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance.
Chris Hayes
The world is scary and terrible and people out here don’t want Obamacare to fix a paper cut let alone offer some discounted mental health care, so what is left for us to do? Talk about it? Stop being afraid of it? Shut down those who want to dismiss us as fragile or crazy?!
Samantha Irby (We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.)
Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor wasn’t angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained, “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.
Jonathan M. Metzl (Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland)
For nearly fifty years after the release of “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” Americans fought back against the statism that Reagan feared. Jimmy Carter’s efforts failed in the 1970s. So did Hillary Clinton’s in the 1990s. But in 2010, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, President Barack Obama found just barely enough support in Congress, both houses of which were controlled by Democrats, to pass Obamacare.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
This is the opposite of the free market.
Bill Maher
Only the United States could engage in a war as dubious as Iraq or roll out a social policy as byzantine as Obamacare and walk away largely unscathed.
Peter Zeihan (The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On)
Obamacare is looked upon as a libtard blasphemy, and a trip to Walmart is considered an occasion
Stephen King (The Institute)
Obamacare is looked upon as a libtard blasphemy, and a trip to Walmart is considered an occasion.
Stephen King (The Institute)
Out of spite, McCain had flipped on his earlier support of Obamacare just to cast the deciding vote that defeated Trump’s effort to repeal and replace it.
Victor Davis Hanson (The Case for Trump)
For the Obamacare rollout, Obama worked with the same public relations specialists who also did the publicity for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Celinda Lake and American Environics, the leftist pollster who advised the Obama campaign to make contraception for women one of the central issues in the 2012 presidential campaign, offered data that was useful. But the driving force in developing the strategy behind branding Obamacare was the Herndon Alliance. They’re the ones who came up with the now infamous line, “If you like your health-care plan you can keep it.
Michael Savage (Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth)
This Obamacare thing really scares me. The United States government / politicians are trying to turn the American people into a brand X “One size fits all” country. The past ten years has been very grim for Americans. Our current state is very grim. Our future is even more grim than ever. I used to tell people that it will get worse before it gets better. Now, I just say it will get worse.
Carroll Bryant
Sorry, Mom and Dad, but I made the less responsible choice on that one. God bless Obamacare and the LGBT Center of Los Angeles’s health clinic. Oh, and it should go without saying, but fuck capitalism.
Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
So let me get this straight – this is a long sentence. We are going to be gifted with a health care plan that we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don’t, which reportedly covers 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman doesn’t understand it, passed by Congress, that didn’t read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke. So what the blank could possibly go wrong?
Barbara Bellar
Unlike the Medicare provisions, which were brought in by negotiation between the two principal parties, ‘Obamacare’ was the initiative of a single party, did not have the consent of the opposition and was concealed within 2,000 pages of legislative jargon that was never properly explained either to the public or to the members of Congress. Not surprisingly, therefore, the legislation has led to a polarization of opinion and a breakdown in the political process, each side claiming to represent the interests of the people, but neither side convinced that ‘the people’ includes those who did not vote for it.
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
At first the left tried to dismiss Gruber by saying he wasn’t an important architect of Obamacare. But earlier this same Gruber had been hailed by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and others as the Oracle of Obamacare.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
But how would the American people have reacted if President Obama had said, In order to extend insurance to 14 million people, we’re going to jeopardize the health insurance of about 200 million Americans? Many of you will lose your policies, and your doctors. Others will see your premiums skyrocket. That is the absurd bargain at the heart of Obamacare. That’s why Gruber noted, rightly, that it could be passed only through deception.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
If you have a really good ideas, one thing you dont need is a fucking gun. An iPad is a kind of a cool thing. They don't need to threaten you with fines to get you to buy one do they? The moment the government says they're gonna force you to do something, you know its a bad idea. If someone invites you on a date with chloroform, an old sofa, and a windowless van, it's not a date. So, the fact that ObamaCare, welfare state, military industrial complex, public schools - you name it. The fact that it has to be imposed at gunpoint is a clue that it's shit. Recognize that when there is a gun to your face, there is not a very advantageous human being on the other end.
Stefan Molyneux
Commenting on print journalism at the Commenting on print journalism at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Thanks to Obamacare, millions of Americans can visit a doctor’s office and see what a print magazine actually looks like.
Joel McHale
Obamacare also provided its bureaucratic social engineers with the power to invent—without consent of Congress—additional mandates to impose on the public. One of these was an anti-conscience requirement that employers must provide insurance coverage for
David Horowitz (Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America)
No sooner did Obamacare pass than the Republican Party made it a sacred cause to repeal it, but each of their assaults on it after gaining control of the presidency in 2017 was beaten back by angry citizens at town-hall meetings and legislators afraid of their ire.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
He was old-school, almost a caricature; the kind of doctor who still survives in a thousand poor-ass rural areas where the nearest hospital is forty or fifty miles away, Obamacare is looked upon as a libtard blasphemy, and a trip to Walmart is considered an occasion.
Stephen King (The Institute)
In the three years after Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, the costs did not go down $2,500 per family as promised. They went up $2,581 a family. Yes, inflation would have pushed the costs of insurance coverage up regardless of Obamacare, but not that much, nor that quickly.
Jack Cashill ("You Lie!": The Evasions, Omissions, Fabrications, Frauds and Outright Falsehoods of Barack Obama)
Those who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy believe that the only legitimate role of government is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense. That is why they have long been fervent opponents of Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, and, most recently, Obamacare. The House budget chairman, Paul Ryan, has explained that such public provision for popular needs not only violates the liberty of the taxpayers whose earnings are transferred to others, but also violates the recipients’ spiritual need to earn their own sustenance.
Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.
A.E. Samaan
If Obamacare is great, why would anyone want a waiver, and why would the government grant them one? It’s a fair question, seeing as 1,231 companies, employing just under four million people, received waivers, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.24 Most federal employees got waivers too.
Matt Margolis (The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama)
The people who hate Obamacare don’t hate it because they believe that it’s funded by forced purchases rather than forced taxes; what they hate is the forcing. Obamacare might not be socialism, but it’s certainly more collectivist than some people care for, restricting individual freedom in the name of the greater good. •
Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
Imagine the horror of Obama and his aides, therefore, when one of the leading academic champions of Obamacare, economist Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, decided to reveal the con, even to the point of confessing it was a con. Gruber himself received $2 million in consulting fees related to Obamacare.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom
Ben Shapiro (The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration)
Let's run the experiment.
Chris Hayes
He sold Syria way better than he sold this.
Bill Maher
By simply refusing to fund a president's unconstitutional conduct, Congress can stop him dead in his tracks - even after the courts have abdicated their responsibilities to do so.
Mike Lee
Because Reagan once said, you can't be for big government, big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.   Boy,
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
How Republicans think: Healthcare for peasants is too expensive. Just let the sick ones die and tell the healthy ones to have more kids. Problem solved.
Oliver Markus Malloy (American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America)
The Democratic party in Louisiana just continued to move father and farther away from basic American values and farther away from the voters of Louisiana. And much farther away from me. So I just couldn’t take it anymore. And recently, there was some comments made in the Senate, the comments were that if anyone opposes what we frequently call Obamacare, if anyone opposes it, they do so only because the President is an African-American, and therefore, that position is racist. My mother, who’s 103 years old, called me on the telephone when she heard that. She said ‘Boy, I don’t want you to be involved in anything like that. I hope you disassociated yourself from that’ and I was on the verge of doing it anyway, and that was just the last straw,
Elbert Guillory
In my time in Washington, no battle has consumed more energy than stopping Obamacare. On the evening of September 24, 2013, it began with a prayer. In my tiny “hideaway” office wedged into a dome in the Capitol Building, Senator Mike Lee and I bowed our heads, read from the Book of Psalms, and asked for the Lord’s guidance. I then walked to the floor of the U.S. Senate and announced, “I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand.”* I opened by noting that “all across this country, Americans are suffering because of Obamacare.” And yet politicians in Washington were not listening to the concerns of their constituents. They weren’t hearing the people with jobs lost or the people forced into part-time work. They had no answers for the people losing their health insurance, or the people who are struggling. With good reason, men and women across America believe that politicians get elected, go to Washington, and stop listening to them. This is the most common thing you hear from the man on the street, from Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians: You’re not listening to me.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.* What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy—away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole. __________ *Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that 'Obamacare' is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often both at the same time.
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
I know that big government sounds appealing sometimes when you are hurting and struggling to make ends meet and then a politician comes along and says: I'm going to create a new program called jobs for Americans and health care for everybody. When you are struggling, this stuff sounds enticing. The problem is it never works. Anytime and anywhere it has been tried, it has failed, and it will fail again. It doesn't work.   In
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
Everyone in America understands ObamaCare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States--it doesn't matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn't matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians--Americans understand this thing is not working.   Yet Washington is pretending not to know. Washington is pretending to have no awareness. Instead we have politicians giving speeches about how wonderful ObamaCare is. At the same time they go to the President and ask for an exemption from ObamaCare for Members of Congress.   If ObamaCare is so wonderful, why is it that its loudest advocates don't want to be subject to it? I will confess that is a very difficult one to figure out.   DC
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
The pity is that many Americans outside the elite bubbles know exactly what’s wrong, but our leaders seem determined to do nothing about it. Any attempt to cut the government chains and anchors off businesses so they can get back to growing, innovating, and creating jobs is demagogued as “tax breaks for the rich” or “favors for the one-percenters.” Never mind that many of those who would benefit are small-business owners who’ve been decimated over the past few years, first by the economic meltdown, then by government policies put in place to “fix” it. The money printed by the Fed to keep the economy pumped up flows to Wall Street, not Main Street, so small businesses aren’t borrowing it to pay for expansion. Even if they wanted to expand, about a third of all U.S. workers are employed by businesses with fifty or fewer employees, and Obamacare insures that if they hire a fifty-first, they’ll face crippling new costs for mandated health care.
Mike Huckabee (God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy: and the Dad-Gummed Gummint That Wants to Take Them Away)
The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the deficit but not when it came to a matter of the tax breaks that had aggravated the deficit in the first place. Now there's a date set for the abolition of Barack Obama's healthcare plan, parts of which only came into operation at the start of this month. The Republicans are out to destroy the plan. Or, more precisely, to pretend to destroy the plan in the name of making good on election pledges. The measure won't get past the Senate. But suppose it did get past the Senate, what effect would this have on the deficit? The answer is it would aggravate the deficit. Somehow, somewhere, there's an override mechanism that makes destroying Obamacare more important than destroying the deficit. If only one could figure out how it works.
James Fenton
Gruber said that Obamacare was sold based on lies. He said the lies only worked because of the stupidity of the American people. Of one key Obamacare provision, Gruber said it was a “very clever exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” He said that while the administration promised transparency, lack of transparency was the key to getting the legislation through. Basically Gruber’s message to his fellow con men was, we fooled the rubes, and we got away with it.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
HillaryCare. He called it, with characteristic bluntness, The Project on Death in America.22 Its rationale was compassionate: to embed hospices and "palliative" care in U.S. health policy. But its basic objective was more pragmatic: rationing care to terminal and seriously ill patients for whom medical attention offered little payoff and who were thus a burden on the system. It was the direct forerunner of the "death panels" of ObamaCare that drew fire from the political right in the next decade.
John Perazzo (From Shadow Party to Shadow Government: George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America)
Gruber had none of these motives. Gruber’s candor about Obamacare was not caused by the desire to be a whistle-blower nor by a drinking spree nor by the prospect of gain. Rather, it was caused by Gruber’s arrogance. The man is a smug self-promoter who wanted to take credit for his participation in a clever racket. Speaking to fellow academics and liberal political activists, Gruber apparently thought he was in a room of thieves cackling about the latest heist they had pulled off. He thought he was swapping notes with others who were “in” on the con.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
He'd [Steve Burd] gotten hooked on the subject after realizing that Safeway's rising medical costs threatened to someday bankrupt the company if he didn't do something to tame them. He'd pioneered innovative wellness and preventive health programs for his employees and became an advocate for universal health coverage, making him one of the only Republican CEOs to embrace many of the tenets of Obamacare. Like Dr. J, he was serious about his own health. He worked out on a treadmill at five every morning and lifted weights in the evenings after dinner.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
The winds of secession are blowing... Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms…” The Federal Superstate In the midst of the fight over the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, Judge Andrew Napolitano interviewed South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, the number three ranking Democrat in Congress, on the Fox News Channel.
Daniel Miller (Texit: Why and How Texas Will Leave The Union)
For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists! If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits. The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.
Mike Huckabee (God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy: and the Dad-Gummed Gummint That Wants to Take Them Away)
...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day.
Kai Bird (The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter)
In his book Dying of Whiteness, Metzl told of the case of a forty-one-year-old white taxi driver who was suffering from an inflamed liver that threatened the man’s life. Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was not able to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived just across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved. “No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens,” the man told Metzl. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die.” And sadly, so he would.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Don’t listen to anyone who tells you Obama wasn’t a leftist president, and especially don’t listen to the liberal media. They lied to you throughout the Obama years, and they’re still lying today. I wish Americans had heeded our warnings because Obama was serious when he vowed to fundamentally transform the nation. He proved it during his eight long years in office by ramming through Obamacare on a party-line vote, appointing activist judges, issuing unconstitutional executive orders, downsizing our military, traveling the world apologizing for America, engineering long-term economic malaise, waging war on coal and coal miners, haranguing the cops, conferring legal status on more than one million illegal aliens via Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and aggravating race relations in this country.
Sean Hannity (Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink)
The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow. The most recent expansions are a prescription drug benefit introduced by George W. Bush and the eponymous health insurance plan known as Obamacare introduced by his successor. Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.
Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
For young people who have never known anything other than these abysmal economic conditions, there is another way. Every time we have implemented pro free-enterprise policies of restraining taxes, restraining regulation, reining in out-of-control government spending and debt, the result has been small businesses have prospered and thrived. They have created jobs, and the result has been young people could get jobs, full-time jobs that advance towards a career and towards the American Dream.  
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
You all should feel excited. You have made history, although, unfortunately, not for a good reason, because the government has put policies in place that have so hammered small businesses that they have created a job market that makes life incredibly difficult for young people.   The recession of the early 1980s was comparable but was followed by a rapid recovery.   Well, gosh, what happened in the early 1980s? President Ronald Reagan was elected. He implemented policies the exact opposite of this administration's policies. Instead of jacking up taxes by $1.7 trillion, as this Congress and this President has done, President Reagan slashed taxes and simplified the Tax Code. Instead of exploding government spending and the debt, President Reagan restrained the growth of government spending. And instead of unleashing regulators like locusts that destroy small businesses, President Reagan restrained regulation and the result was incredible growth.   For
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
To this point, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been the Republican flavor of the year. Events from the IRS scandal to NSA revelations to the Obamacare train wreck have corroborated libertarian suspicions of federal power. And Paul has shown serious populist skills in cultivating those fears for his political benefit. For a while, he succeeded in a difficult maneuver: Accepting the inheritance of his father's movement while distancing himself from the loonier aspects of his father's ideology. But now Rand Paul has fallen spectacularly off the tightrope. It turns out that a senior member of his Senate staff, Jack Hunter, has a history of neo-Confederate radio rants. And Paul has come to the defense of his aide. . . . This would not be the first time that Paul has heard secessionist talk in his circle of confederates--I mean, associates. His father has attacked Lincoln for causing a "senseless" war and ruling with an "iron fist." Others allied with Paulism in various think tanks and websites have accused Lincoln of mass murder and treason. For Rand Paul to categorically repudiate such views and all who hold them would be to excommunicate a good portion of his father's movement. This disdain for Lincoln is not a quirk or a coincidence. Paulism involves more than the repeal of Obamacare. It is a form of libertarianism that categorically objects to 150 years of expanding federal power. . . . Not all libertarians, of course, view Appomattox as a temporary setback. A libertarian debate on the topic: "Lincoln: Hero or Despot?" would be two-sided, lively and well attended. But Paulism is more than the political expression of the Austrian school of economics. It is a wildly ambitious ideology in which Hunter's neo-Confederate views are not uncommon. What does this mean for the GOP? It is a reminder that, however reassuring his manner, it is impossible for Rand Paul to join the Republican mainstream. The triumph of his ideas and movement would fundamentally shift the mainstream and demolish a century and a half of Republican political history. The GOP could no longer be the party of Reagan's internationalism or of Lincoln's belief in a strong union dedicated to civil rights.
Michael Gerson
In 2009, Obama surrogate Jim Messina told Democratic Senators that they could defend Obamacare as stridently as possible – because, after all, “If you get hit,” Messina said, “we will punch back twice as hard.
Ben Shapiro (How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument)
Thanks to Obamacare, millions of Americans can visit a doctor’s office and see what a print magazine actually looks like.
Joel McHale
again: Obamacare didn't kill jobs, it created
Anonymous
CESCA: Desperate Mitch McConnell Gets Slippery on Obamacare
Anonymous
from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible
Ben Shapiro (The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration)
if they flew in the face of Christian values—well, maybe he could sneak it past them. Obama’s first big sneak-attack came buried on page 747,356 or so of the Obamacare enabling legislation. Religious employers and institutions
Floyd G Brown (Obama's Enemies List: How Barack Obama Intimidated America and Stole the Election)
The president and his subordinates made numerous willful misrepresentations and material omissions of fact in order to (a) discredit opponents of the health insurance legislation commonly known as “Obamacare” (the PPACA), (b) secure political support for the passage of the legislation despite intense public opposition to it, and (c) win his reelection to the presidency by concealing damaging information about the prohibitively high costs and burdens of the PPACA that would have demonstrated that many of his prior representations had been false.
Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
Nor did we hear on the campaign trail that Obama would push gay marriage, open borders, near-permanent zero interest rates, six consecutive $1 trillion deficits, and record food-stamp and Social Security disability payouts. He criticized Bush for relatively minor executive orders, suggesting that he would never rule by fiat — as he since has done in matters of Obamacare, immigration law, and environmental regulations. Remember the promise of ending the revolving door and stopping aides from cashing in — and then follow the post-administration careers of Obama’s closest advisers.
Anonymous
At least there is calm at home? Hardly: food, gas, and electricity prices are at near all-time highs; a stagnant economy in “recovery” that for most people outside of Wall Street remains recessionary; government soon to be run by executive orders; the end of any idea of national sovereignty or a southern border; the Ferguson riots and racial explosions revealing an America more divided than at any time since the 1970s; the buffoonish Missouri governor Nixon playing the Katrina role of a now imprisoned Ray Nagin. The alphabet soup of unresolved IRS, VA, NSA, and AP scandals; revolutionary, extra-legal justice meted out to Rick Perry; Benghazi coming back into the news; the little reported on drip-by-drip practical dissolution of Obamacare. 1979–80 seem calm in comparison. The chaos arises from a variety of causes, but one common denominator is that President Obama has not a clue how to deal with these crises.
Anonymous
in Protest Against Obama The mandate has awakened Catholic Church leaders to the dire threat that this poses to religious liberty. In fact, a coalition of forty-three Catholic and Protestant institutions has filed twelve separate lawsuits against ObamaCare’s abortion mandate – even as the Supreme Court reconsiders
Floyd G Brown (Obama's Enemies List: How Barack Obama Intimidated America and Stole the Election)
Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) has enjoined the fight against Obamacare. ERLC leader Richard Land says: “…this issue is not about contraceptives. Instead, it is about conscience and religious freedom. And we must not allow this assault on our First Amendment freedoms to stand.”70
Floyd G Brown (Obama's Enemies List: How Barack Obama Intimidated America and Stole the Election)
The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. In addition, he has unilaterally and unlawfully amended and “waived” the statute’s terms—guided by his knowledge that timely, lawful application of the deeply unpopular law would be devastating to his party’s electoral prospects and would have made him a one-term president.
Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
from nonprofit organizations to push Obamacare—the same organizations responsible for directly implementing Obamacare and therefore subject to HHS oversight. • At virtually the same time, Republican lawmakers send a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking why the EPA has forced conservative groups to pay fees for Freedom of
Ben Shapiro (The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration)
They should make presidential lawlessness the central issue in the upcoming election cycle. Lawlessness, faithless execution, is the theme that illuminates Obamacare, the IRS scandal, the Benghazi massacre, Fast and Furious, the campaign to erode our constitutional liberties, and the growing instability that threatens our prosperity and security.
Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
As he travels the country, he has hardened his positions, delighting the base of his party but moving farther from the positions of most Americans on most issues. He denies the existence of man-made climate change, opposes comprehensive immigration reform, rejects marriage equality, and, of course, demands the repeal of “every blessed word of Obamacare.” (Cruz gets his own health-care coverage from Goldman Sachs, where his wife is a vice-president.)
Anonymous
pleads with traditional media for better Obamacare coverage rss@dailykos.com (Joan McCarter)
Anonymous
And yet this was a liability for the Democrat. McConnell, whose mantra was to repeal Obamacare “root and branch,” won in a wipeout. The absurdity of the outcome was captured in a May poll of Kentuckians by NBC and Marist College. When asked how they felt about both Obamacare and Kynect, respondents disapproved of Obamacare by 56 to 33 percent but they approved of Kynect by 29 to 22 percent, despite the fact that Kynect is Obamacare. Only 22 percent of whites disapproved of Kynect, but 60 percent of them disapproved of Obamacare.
Anonymous
Several significant Obamacare fixes would draw considerable support from Republicans and Democrats.
Anonymous
The law needs significant changes to provide flexible coverage for Americans at a price they can afford. These changes must be made with a key fact in mind: Millions of Americans already rely on Obamacare for coverage.
Anonymous
Some Republicans will see political risk in such a negotiation — a fix to Obamacare would be a tacit admission that it is here to stay. But the alternative is to do nothing, and let Obamacare continue with all its warts.
Anonymous
Republicans, repair Obamacare. Some Democrats will enlist and many voters will thank you.
Anonymous
The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare.
Andrew McCarthy (Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment)
The first zombie must have come out of the water from Gulf beaches along the Mississippi, Alabama and Florida Panhandle, an area no more than maybe 100 miles wide. They weren’t sure where they originated before that, but all sorts of theories abounded. Cuba was a popular one. Obamacare was also popular.
Anonymous
The ways governments measure employment and wages will have to change. Many European tax systems treat freelances as second-class citizens, while American states have different rules for “contract workers” that could be tidied up. Too much of the welfare state is delivered through employers, especially pensions and health care: both should be tied to the individual and made portable, one area where Obamacare was a big step forward. But even if governments adjust their policies to a more individualistic age, the on-demand economy clearly imposes more risk on individuals.
Anonymous
The Republicans want to frighten the voters into believing that the Democrats will sell out Israel and the United States. Selling this phony message is tremendously important to them as they get ready for the 2016 election. Domestically, their arguments against the Democrats are vanishing. Obamacare is increasingly popular as signups become more efficient. The deficit—the Holy Grail for Republicans—is shrinking. Unemployment is declining. All they can do is complain that Obama and the Democrats are surrendering to Islam.
Anonymous
Quite a few well-known pundits are, or at some point were, “inflation truthers,” claiming that the government is lying about the pace of price increases. There have also been many prominent Obamacare truthers declaring that the White House is cooking the books, that the policies are worthless, and so on.
Anonymous
75 percent of doctors said they ordered medically unnecessary tests to avoid lawsuits. 
Philip Klein (Overcoming Obamacare: Three Approaches to Reversing the Government Takeover of Health Care)
If the metric of success is gonna be which plan can say ‘we’ve given more people more cards,’ they always win. Because they will always spend more, they will always disrupt more.
Philip Klein (Overcoming Obamacare: Three Approaches to Reversing the Government Takeover of Health Care)
If those with pre-existing conditions can be covered separately and removed from the broader insurance market, it would make it easier to create a functioning free market for everybody else.
Philip Klein (Overcoming Obamacare: Three Approaches to Reversing the Government Takeover of Health Care)
So, let’s assume for a moment that you’re a typical American voter: you care more about Miley Cyrus twerking on the Video Music Awards than you do about the vagaries of Obamacare. Let’s assume all you’ve really seen about the elections is the coverage in the mainstream press and what the candidates said about each other during the debates.
Ben Shapiro (How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument)
[Ted] Cruz railed against his fellow senators for not appreciating the risk that Obamacare would destroy healthcare for America’s families ... Cruz then lodged a more general complaint against his Senate colleagues who, he said, seemed more concerned with “cocktail parties in Washington, D.C.” than with their constituents. Referring to calls that he said were pouring in from around the country, begging legislators to resist and defund, Cruz noted, “It is apparently an imposition on some members of this body for their constituents to pick up the phone and ask for assistance.” As I heard him say that, I picked up the phone and called Cruz’s local constituent service office in Houston. “Could someone there give me information about how to enroll in Obamacare?” I asked, when I was put on the phone with one of the senator’s case workers. “No. We don’t support the bill, and think it’s a bad idea,” I was told.
Steven Brill (America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System)
If I had been under ObamaCare, and a bureaucrat had been trying to tell me when I could get that CT scan, that would have delayed my treatment. I was able to get the treatment as fast as I could based upon my timetable, and not the government's timetable. That's what saved my life.
Herman Cain
It is as the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi once observed: Pass it to find out what is in it. That is how Washington does business.   Let
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
Are millions of Americans out of work? Yes. Are millions of Americans struggling? Yes. Are millions of Americans seeing their health insurance premiums skyrocket? Yes. Are millions of Americans at risk of losing their health insurance because of ObamaCare? Yes.   But Washington tells our constituents: No, no, never mind. It can't be done. It cannot be done. It is impossible. The rules of Washington say this cannot be done.   And we wonder why this body has such low approval among the people. When we go out and tell the American people it cannot be done, there is nothing that can be done to stop ObamaCare, what we are saying is we are not willing to do it. We are not willing to stand and fight.   We
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
I want to ask each of you to imagine, imagine millions of courageous conservatives, all across America, rising up together to say in unison “we demand our liberty.” Today, roughly half of born again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values. Today
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)