This article was written by Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, a board-certified diagnostic radiologist in Kansas, and President Obama’s second cousin once removed. President Obama’s great-great grandfather, Thomas Creekmore McCurry, is Dr. Wolf’s great-grandfather. Dr. Wolf’s mother, Anna Margaret McCurry, was five years older than Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The two were childhood friends until the Dunhams moved from Kansas to Seattle in 1955.
Dr. Wolf blogs at
http://wolffiles.blogspot.com/
"Selective enforcement of the law is the first sign of tyranny. A government empowered to determine arbitrarily who may operate outside the rule of law invariably embraces favoritism as friends, allies and those with the best-funded lobbyists are rewarded. Favoritism inevitably leads to corruption, and corruption invites extortion. Ultimately, the rule of law ceases to exist in any recognizable form, and what is left is tyranny.
America’s founders rejected that road to tyranny when they boldly declared that all men are created equal. They wrote a Constitution meant to secure the promise of equal protection under the law.
President Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrats all, in their rush to take over America’s health care system, made all sorts of outlandish, unkeepable promises. Among the most egregious: Obamacare would allow you to keep your current health insurance and your doctor. Mr. Obama’s own Medicare chief actuary now acknowledges that Obamacare may cause up to 20 million Americans to lose their current health insurance policies, and doctors are increasingly leaving Medicare, Medicaid and the practice of medicine altogether. Good luck keeping them. Another unkeepable promise: Obamacare will create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately. The Congressional Budget Office’s budget director estimates the law actually will destroy 800,000 jobs.
Obamacare’s chickens, to borrow a phrase our president may have heard somewhere before, are coming home to roost. The law, as currently adjudicated, has been ruled unconstitutional. The president’s own secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, has admitted a major section of the Obamacare law is "totally unsustainable". Before casting his vote in favor of Obamacare, Sen. Kent Conrad, North Dakota Democrat, described it as "a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of". Well, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Madoff certainly would be proud of you and your colleagues.
The now-familiar monthly trickling down of new waivers is, at best, a tacit admission that Obamacare is a failure. So far, seven entire states and 1,372 businesses, unions and other institutions have received waivers from the law. The list includes the administration’s friends and allies and, of course, those who have the best lobbyists.
More than 50 percent of the Obamacare waiver beneficiaries are union members, which is striking because union members account for less than 12 percent of the American work force. The same unions that provided more than $120 million to Democrats in the last two elections and, in many cases, openly campaigned in favor of the government takeover of your health care, now celebrate that Obamacare is not their problem.
But the political payoffs don’t stop there. The Obama administration didn't forget its closest friends in the latest round of waivers. Although there are 435 congressional districts across America, nearly 20 percent of the new waivers, amazingly, found their way to a single district - Mrs. Pelosi's. As for Mr. Reid, well, the entire state of Nevada found an early waiver in its Christmas stocking. After all, what kind of a political crony would the president be if he couldn’t pull a few strings?
The priorities of the Obama administration and its Democratic allies are on display with every waiver granted. The list of beneficiaries in Mrs. Pelosi’s district, for example, belongs in an episode of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". Mrs. Pelosi, champion of the unions and no stranger to hypocrisy, has amassed a fortune as part owner of Napa Valley Auberge du Soleil resort - a luxurious non-union shop. Now her luxury boutique colleagues also can benefit from her "do as I say" politics. The "four-diamond luxury" hotel Campton Place, Tru Spa, Allure magazine’s "best day spa in San Fransisco”; Boboquivari’s and its $59 porterhouse steaks; and Cafe des Amis, "a timeless Parisian style brasserie", are among her beneficiaries.
As American families are being squeezed by increasing health insurance premiums as well as rising gasoline and grocery prices, I'm sure they'll be relieved to know that San Francisco's down-and-out millionaires will be protected from paying Obamacare’s bills. Mercifully, Mrs. Pelosi’s limousine liberals will no longer be forced to beg for Grey Poupon from every Rolls-Royce passing by.
Why did these particular businesses receive waivers? The administration that calls itself the most transparent in history won’t say. Nor will it explain why it has denied at least 79 requests from others. Worse still, Health and Human Services has decreed that it will not even accept waiver requests from individuals, so if you choose to purchase your insurance directly, you have no recourse.
Americans deserve and, in fact, are guaranteed by our Constitution a level playing field. We were never promised equality in results, but we do deserve to play by the same rules and to be judged by the same standards. When a new law like Obamacare is so deeply flawed that its supporters openly violate these American bedrock principles to sustain it, it’s time to repeal that law.
I will repeat the same question I’ve been asking since the first health care waiver was granted: If Obamacare is such a great law, why does the White House keep exempting its best friends from it?”
Here is another Obamacare opinion from Obama’s cousin, Dr. Wolfe:
Michele Malkin is not an Obama family member, but seems to have similar doubts as Obama cousin Dr. Wolfe, as expressed in her post from several months ago:
"Obamacare refugees first began beating down the exit doors in October 2010. It started with McDonald's and Jack in the Box; spread to Dish Networks, hair salon chain Regis Corp and resort giant Universal Orlando; took hold among every major Big Labor organization from the AFL-CIO to the CWA to the SEIU; roped in the nationalized health care promoters at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (whose board of trustees includes health care czar Nancy Ann DeParle); and is now gripping entire states (Florida, Tennesee, Ohio, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire and Nevada all recently received their waivers).
Now the west coast liberals seemed troubled about ObamaCare. In the middle of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi's congressional district, a cluster of San Francisco small businesses is among the latest recipients of get-out-of-Obamacare free passes. As Jamie Dupree of Cox Media Group and Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller pointed out this week, there are at least two dozen Bay Area companies -- including bars, restaurants, hotels, tourist shops, real estate and auto firms -- that have secured temporary, one-year reprieves from the federal law. It's the San Francisco Treat that voters didn't foresee until after the bill was rammed down their throats.
Another noteworthy waiver winner: Seattle-based REI. The trendy Pacific Northwest outdoor equipment retailer's progressive CEO and Democratic campaign donor, Sally Jewell, appeared with President Obama in 2009 to tout White House health care reform initiatives. Two years later, REI received a waiver to protect the health benefits of a whopping 1,180 workers from the very tentacles of the big government bureaucrats that Jewell had embraced at Obama's roundtable.
To date, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has granted federal health care law exemptions to more than three million American workers covered by more than 1,300 unions, companies and insurers who had voluntarily offered low-cost health plans with annual benefits limits. Meddling Obamacare architects outlawed those private plans -- nicknamed "mini med" plans -- in the name of "patients' rights." But without special waivers, the escapees would have been forced to hike premiums or drop insurance coverage altogether for mostly low-wage, seasonal and part-time workers."
UPDATE: As of June 18,2011 exemptions to Obamacare now apply to over 3 million American workers, 1,372 companies and labor unions, and seven states because it is too expensive and unmanageable.
Read More:
"Among the most recent union affiliates to secure pardons from the one-size-fits-all ObamaCare health policy that their bosses spent hundreds of millions of dollars of worker dues lobbying for:
- Teamsters Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund in Brooklyn, N.Y.
- Detroit and Vicinity Trowel Trades Health and Welfare Fund_
- Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1182 Security Benefits Fund_
- CWA Local 1183 Health and Welfare Fund
- Bakers Union and Food Employees Labor Relations Association Health and Welfare Fund
- Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois Home Care and Child Care Fund
- United Food and Commercial Workers San Diego Employers Health and Welfare Trust
- Welfare Fund of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 15, 15A, 15C, 15D AFL-CIO
- United Steelworkers Local 1-0318 Health and Welfare Trust Fund
- United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices Local 198 AFL-CIO Health and Welfare Trust
- Teamsters Local 617 Welfare Fund in Ridgefield, N.J.
- Teamsters Local 734 Welfare Fund in Chicago
- Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 60 Health and Welfare Fund
- New York State Nurses Welfare Plan for New York City Employed Registered Professional Nurses
The ultimate goal, it bears repeating, is to force a massive, revolutionary and irreversible shift from private to public insurance designed by government-knows-best bureaucrats.
Pelosi and the Golden Ticket Administrators in Washington deny preferential treatment for waiver beneficiaries. But the stench of waivers-for-favors won't be dispelled until and unless the Obama administration releases a full list not only of those who won exemptions, but also of those who applied and were denied.
With San Francisco businesses caught with their hands in the waiver jar, Pelosi's office could do nothing else but pout: "It is pathetic," said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill, "that there are those who would be cheering for Americans to lose their minimum health coverage or see their premiums increase for political purposes."
It is far more pathetic to have cheered, as Pelosi did on the one-year anniversary of Obamacare, the law's onerous benefits limits from which thousands of her own constituents have now been exempted.
Once again, the rest of America wants to know: Dude, where's my waiver?"
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Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010).
