Obamacare hits the street, hard

Years ago, I saw an old movie that started with an airplane and its steely-eyed test pilot hero in a screaming nose dive. You could tell it was a dive by the shots of the airplane’s instrument panel: the big hand on the altimeter dial was unwinding at about one revolution per second. But this was Hollywood, so the valiant hero managed to pull out of the dive at the last moment to make a perfect landing.

There’s only one problem: one revolution per second is a rate of descent of 1,000 feet per second, which is faster than the speed of sound. Talk about private sector velocity!

You get the same sense of unreality with the propaganda about Obamacare’s website from hell, HealthCare.gov, so it was delicious to get some real reporting from The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash about how things are going on the Obamacare street.

Labash went on a house-to-house tour with a couple of non-partisan “evangelists” in a “semi-sketchy” neighborhood in South Florida.

At the Hollywood public library, I meet up with Get Covered America’s Katie Vicsik and Rhianna Hurt, 2 of 28 Florida staffers (they also have nearly 1,800 volunteers on the ground in the state). They are twentysomething, earnest, clipboard-carrying, and as adorable as speckled pups.

Unfortunately, the adorable pups didn’t seem to stir many “oohs” and “aahs” as they went house to house evangelizing Obamcare. Then they get to the house of a “graying woman named Joyce Lipman.”

Katie tells Ms. Lipman that they are out to “educate folks about what their new health insurance options are.”  But the graying woman isn’t having any.

Joyce is then off to the races with a 15-minute harangue on all her health problems, and how the insurance at the hospital where she works now sucks because of Obamacare. She tells of her diabetes, and the testing strips she can no longer afford. She shows us the hole in her gum, left by recurring mouth tumors. It’s getting uncomfortable.

Now I’ve always thought that graying women with jobs at the hospital and diabetes problems were exactly the sort of “little people” that Democrats loved. And imagine this: Joyce Lipman voted for Obama, twice.

Our non-partisan evangelists then went to talk to Welly Corgelas, an African-American auto detailer.  He gives the girls the business, too. For him the combination of insurance companies and government in Obamacare amounts to “[t]wo barracudas getting together and saying we made something good for you”.

So let’s leave the non-partisan pups (who both volunteered on the Obama campaign) and get to the real action.  “In a computer lab at Miami Dade College, a roomful of nearly 100 uninsured or underinsured citizens, with the help of 19 or so Navigators, take the daunting plunge into HealthCare.gov.”

So here’s what happened. Exactly zero people signed up for Obamacare. One woman couldn’t get the thing to work; another blanched at the premiums, a third walked away from the deductibles.

Zip, zero, nada.

As Glenn Reynolds says, “read the whole thing.”

Now, it’s time for the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger message to our liberal friends. The 37 million uninsured that you’ve kept going on about aren’t helpless victims. All along, they have been making a cunning decision not to pay their fair share. Obamacare is going to upset their lives and they ain’t gonna be happy about it.

See you in November, Katie and Rhianna!

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