If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.

Pres. Obama, various dates, August, 2009

As with car sales pitches, voters are advised to listen to politicians’ promises carefully before buying in. Read the fine print; read between the lines; caveat emptor. Listening to Pres. Obama’s health care speeches throughout 2009, one could wrongly conclude that he was promising that consumers could keep their old system of healthcare. Tell that today to anyone seeking to insure a child starting September 23, the date upon which Obamacare will effectively outlaw individual coverage of children’s healthcare.

Starting September 23, Obamacare outlaws denying coverage to children based on preexisting medical conditions. While that sounds nice, the effect is that nearly every provider of individual children’s healthcare has ceased to write new policies, and the remaining few will probably also drop out of the market. The insurers’ reasoning is simple – children are usually quite healthy, except for the expensive few who are not. If parents are allowed to wait to buy insurance until after their children are afflicted with tragic diseases, the risk pool will be over weighted with very expensive clients. By outlawing the screening of new clients before accepting them, the statistical methods that allow for risk sharing become meaningless. Because of the government mandate, there is no way to make a profit, so insurance companies are leaving the market.

Now Obama did not exactly lie here. He said “If you like your health care plan,” not “if you want your neighbor’s health care plan.” Those children lucky enough to be born before September 2010 might still keep their insurance; too bad for the new crop. Of course Obama deceived voters by not disclosing that Obamacare would deny insurance to young people. He promised coverage for 30 million people, most of whom choose to not buy the insurance they could afford, but he forgot to mention the responsible people who would like to buy insurance but now cannot.

While denying health insurance to children is bad policy, it does not stop there. The same preexisting condition law will soon take effect for everyone. Obamacare will bar insurers from writing new individual policies to everyone. Again, you can” keep your health care plan,” but if you are a young person looking for new coverage, tough luck.

Look for the Obama administration to fault the insurance companies and their evil profit motive. Obama will surely call for a public option to cover those unfortunate enough to seek individual insurance after Obamacare outlawed it. Young people will have no real choice but to buy government backed insurance. With old people already on social healthcare since the 1960′s, it will only take a matter of a few decades before everyone is forced into government single provider health care.

Obama may have been popular with young people in 2008, but few of them likely realized that Obamacare would be a continuation of the government’s policy of robbing relatively poor young people to pay for entitlements for relatively wealthy old people. As with Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare effectively transfer wealth from young workers to retirees who should have prepared for their own needs. The government currently transfers about 14% of each worker’s earnings to the older generations’ pockets, often leaving the young workers incapable of preparing for their own retirement. Fully socialized medicine, thanks to Obamacare, is a continuation of the enslavement of younger workers to benefit the fat baby-boom voter block.

So, Obama did not exactly lie when he pitched his socialized medicine plan. Sure, Obamacare is an injustice to responsible individuals who want to buy the health coverage that suites their needs. Sure, Obamacare is a crafty trap that forces people to choose a single payer government system. Obama never said it wasn’t. Voters just didn’t read the fine print.

As Shout Bits completes its second year of commentary, some readers have justly criticized it for becoming more negative in the face of Washington’s vigorous assault on freedom and prosperity. Shout Bits can only plead that it had no idea how radical and high-handed Pres. Obama would be. A leftist, certainly, but Obama has also shredded property rights (e.g. the Chrysler theft and BP shakedown) and any semblance of ethics (the various blatant payoffs to lawmakers to enact socialized medicine). It is hard to remain optimistic even in the greatest nation. Still, here are some words of hope: everything Obama has done will be undone eventually, and the best advice is to live like Obama never happened.

Of course Obama and his Democrat lieutenants have dealt a serious blow to the US with their regulation, spending, and socialist takeovers, but their excesses are nothing new. Countries like Russia already tried the collectivist route and failed. Other countries like Greece and much of Old Europe tried socialism-light, and are only now failing. Obama’s socialist experiment comes very late to the party, with the US emulating Europe just as Europe is ready to give in and admit failure. While it has taken 60 to 70 years for Europe’s socialist experiment to fail, Obama’s experiment will not last nearly as long. Europe socialized long before its debts became un-payable, but the US enacted the final piece of socialist paradise when its debts were already clearly out of hand. The bill for Washington excess will likely come due before Obamacare even fully takes effect.

Reality will force the failure and repeal of everything Obama has done, along with the creeping socialist agenda of nearly every modern President before him. If not, the US itself will fail like Greece. Either way Obama’s theft or destruction of the US system of freedom and prosperity will not stand even to the end of the new decade. As an absolute certainty, something will change, and that is good news.

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged tells the story of a capitalist who gave up on a world eerily like Obama’s US. Galt, Shrugged’s hero, built a new liberal paradise of capitalism and property rights. Galt’s hidden mountain paradise, however, is as impractical as Rand’s book is tedious. Outside of idealized fiction there is simply no choice but to carry on.

Obama’s policies, every one, will fail and be abandoned. Whether Obama is replaced with a return to a rule of law, individual rights, and a capitalist system or anarchy is the choice of businesspeople and libertarians. Even though Obamacare ironically encourages people to drop their health care, pay for it anyway. Even though Obama will double the taxes on investments next year, invest in the US’s future. Even though Obama’s spending squeezes the profit out of employing people, look for talent among the unemployed. Even though Obama has claimed the lion’s prize of the wealth of this nation, for now accept what little Washington has yet to claim. If only for show, keep the capitalist engine running because someday soon the US will abandon socialism and today’s optimists will be best poised to prosper.

In other words, keep living like Obama never happened because collectivist experiments always fail and someone always emerges from the wreckage to restore prosperity. Accepting Washington as the new guardian of our lives will only extend Obama’s lost years.