How Obamacare destroys the Rule of Law

I have several concerns about Obamacare. One is creeping nationalization. Healthcare accounts for 17% of the US economy. Obamacare appears designed to gradually destroy private health care and force more and more people to turn to the government for health care. Nationalization is contrary to the concept of a free people. I think we should be looking for ways to privatize services government already provides rather than nationalize services provided by the private sector.

Another concern, is that Obamacare will bankrupt our country; we just can't afford it. With the National Debt standing at $14.1 trillion dollars and entitlements and interest on the debt making up the bulk of annual government expenditures, we cannot afford another entitlement. The US holds a debt to GDP ratio of 94%! This is not sustainable. We are like a household that is living our lifestyle by financing it on credit cards and we keep getting an increase in the credit limit or get a new credit card every time we approach maxing out a credit card. Adding another entitlement is the last thing we need to be doing.

I am also concerned that government does not do very much very well. I fear the quality of health care will surfer with more government control.

I am concerned about the increase in government power and the unconstitutional nature of Obamacare. I believe our freedom is due primarily to the wisdom found in our constitution which places limits on government authority. If there are no limits on government authority, if the constitution is meaningless, then our freedom is at risk. Surely the Commerce Cause is not so broad that government can force people to purchase a product. If it is, the government can force us to do almost anything.

While all of these are concerns, I am equally deeply concerned about what Obmacare does to the Rule of Law. Rule of Law is not the same as law and order. Rule of Law means that the law is applied equally. Rule of Law means the government does not pick winners and looser.

The book club to which I belong recently selected The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek and I reread this classic. Below are excerpts on the topic of the Rule of Law from that work:

Noting distinguished more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles know as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government is all its actions is bound by rules issued and announced beforehand-rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authorities will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan ones individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.

When the government has to decide how many pigs are to be raised or how many buses are to be run, which coal mines are to operate or what prices shoes are to be sold, those decisions cannot be deduced from principle or settled for long periods in advance. They depend inevitable on the circumstances of the monument and making such decision it will always be necessary to balance one against the other the interest of various person and groups.

It does not matter whether we all drive on he left or on the right-side of the road so long as we all do the same. The important thing is that the rule enable us to predict other people's behavior correctly, and this requires that it should apply to all cases-even if in a particular instant we feel it to be unjust.

We have already seen more than 700 waivers to the requirements of ObamaCare exempting those who got the waiver from a provision in the new health care law that bans annual limits on what an insurance company will pay for health care coverage.

This is an outrage! Many of those granted waivers are friends of the administration and campaign contributors, such as the United Federation of Teachers and locals of the SEIU. That is not government by Rule of Law but is autocratic grants to friends. That is not the way things are done in a democracy. That is not the way things are supposed to work in America

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