◼ Obamacare poll is even worse than it looks - Philip Klein/Washington Examiner @philipklein
Guy Benson ◼ points to a new Fox poll with findings that he describes as “brutal” for President Obama’s health care law. Specifically, Benson highlights this question:
22. Do you think it would be better to leave the new health care law in place, or would it be better to go back to the health care system that was in place in 2009?
Better to keep law: 34 percent
Better to go back to previous system: 56 percent
Those numbers are bad enough on the surface, but they’re even worse when compared with polling data from 2009, which shows that Americans weren’t exactly thrilled with the status quo. In a Pew survey taken in June 2009, in the early stages of Obama’s health care push, 30 percent of Americans said they thought the health care system required “fundamental changes” and 41 percent responded that it needed to be “completely rebuilt.”
◼ The unwelcome role of the IRS in Obamacare - Michael Gerson/Washington Post
...the IRS is not merely implementing Obamacare. It engaged in a regulatory power grab to ensure that it could implement Obamacare....
As the implementation of health care reform moves forward, Congress may need to take another look at the law anyway. The unintended effects of Obamacare now seem unavoidable: higher premiums in employer plans; additional burdens on a Medicaid system already struggling with quality issues; cost controls in Medicare that will drive out providers; a perverse incentive structure that encourages businesses to dump employees on the exchanges while discouraging the young and healthy from signing up, eventually raising costs.
But the IRS power grab is a reminder of how shoddy the law really is. The whole enterprise is precariously perched atop a flimsy bureaucratic excuse. And the agency providing that excuse is a discredited mess.
