Buyer’s remorse, above all in this economy, hurts badly, especially if the item is not returnable. Buy a house right before the market crashed? That hurts.
Wish you never laid eyes on that pricey car that has now become a black hole of endless repair bills? That hurts.
Voted for your congressman, senator or even the president who forced Obamacare down your throat? That’s really bad.
Now we are all stuck. And the bad news keeps coming in, seemingly on a daily basis.
One day it’s Aetna who announces they will stop selling plans to small groups in Colorado. The next it’s Iowa-based Principal Financial Group, which covers 840,000 individuals, and announces it would be dropping out of the insurance market rather than comply with the new regulations of the healthcare law.
And then it’s McDonald’s and 29 other companies who somehow manage to get waivers from the government in order that their combined one million plus employees can keep their healthcare. What happened to Obamacare being so great?
Buyer’s remorse is no fun. Having one’s health is of utmost importance and to know that the government has its long arms stretched far into the patient-doctor relationship is not reassuring at all. In fact, it is downright scary.
During the healthcare debate, no one argued that healthcare reform was not needed. Indeed, our system has serious flaws and is surely in need of reform. As a doctor myself, I see this on a daily basis. But the reform that was ultimately signed into law is not what was needed. We did not have to go down the path of Europe and Canada towards socialized medicine.
Americans do not want Obamacare. In Missouri, voters rejected the individual mandate, the very heart of the healthcare law, overwhelmingly and similar measures are on the ballots in Arizona, Oklahoma and Colorado in November.
Americans want to be able to make their own healthcare decisions and they do not want the government telling them what they can or cannot spend their own money on for tests, essential medicine or the like.
Even though just a handful of states have a constitutional amendment on the ballot, 42 states in total have introduced legislation to keep their citizens from being forced to purchase health insurance under the government mandate.
The election is surely about the economy but it also hinges immensely on Obamacare. For the first time in as long as I can remember, watching the town hall meetings last summer was exciting because Americans finally woke up and realized that their freedoms were on the line.
We are a strong-willed nation and cringe at the fact that anyone, let alone the government, should dictate how we should live our lives. If the individual mandate is upheld in the courts, the government will have obtained an unprecedented amount of power.
They will be able to mandate just about anything. The government will have the right to tell us what kind of car we should drive, how many servings of fruits and vegetables we have to eat a day, or how many pints of beer we can drink a week.
The very least Americans can do at this moment is to act on the state level to ensure protection from the mandate, which is why constitutional amendments are so crucial.
Buyer’s remorse of Obamacare doesn’t have to end with the destruction of our basic freedoms. There are the constitutional amendments and there are the elections. Americans must make their voices heard in November or there very well may be no turning back.
Eric Novack, MD, is the chairman of the U.S. Health Freedom Coalition and chairman of Arizonans for Health Care Freedom.
