Obamacare Schadenfreude Lingers in 2016

Obamacare Schadenfreude has slowed down as journalists have turned their eye to promoting (or trashing) Hillary Clinton's or Donald Trump's candidacy, but the financial cancer that is Obamacare keeps growing:

New emails, uncovered in the IRS controversy show that contrary to prior claims that the Obama administration went out of its way to inflict the ACA contraception mandate on the Catholic Church:

. . . Administration health policy officials were downright obsessed with figuring out which Catholic institutions would fit within the section 6033-based exemption. As early as October 2011, the White House was trying to figure out how to structure the exemption so that Catholic universities would be forced to provide student contraceptives in student health plans. In July 2012, emails show officials trying to make sure that the contraceptive mandate would treat the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – the spiritual leaders of Roman Catholic entities in the United States – differently from the colleges, charities, and other groups that they lead. The documents were originally discovered during congressional inquiries into the sharing of tax information between the IRS and the White House. . . 

As promised, the 2016 Congressional session opened with bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. It was passed using the "reconciliation" trick that democrats used to pass the bill in the first place, avoiding a Senatorial filibuster, and dutifully vetoed by President Obama. Paul Ryan vows an attempt to muster the votes for an override in the near future. Democrats, of course, decry the efforts as a waste of time, while Republicans tout the unpopularity of the law. According to the CBO the Bill gutting ObamaCare would save half-trillion over a decade. Half a trillion here, half a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Still Despite Subsidies, Poor Spending 10-20 Percent of Income on ObamaCare. See the numbers here.

And, as conservatives predicted, more people are choosing to pay the penalties and not pay for Obamacare than the administration hoped.

#3 in the list of The top 12 revolving-door moments of 2015

3.) President Obama said he was going to stop the revolving door, and he spoke as if Obamacare was a broadside to the industry. If you believed either of these lines, you were surprised in 2011 when Obama picked hospital executive Marilyn Tavenner as Medicare administrator. Not done with the revolving door, Tavenner cashed out in 2015 to become president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the largest lobby for the insurance industry, which is — thanks to Obamacare — increasingly dependent on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for profits.

Administering the law in the first place is an excellent way to become acquainted with the law, and probably more importantly, the permanent bureaucracy that enforces it. Time to invoke Instapundit's "Revolving Door Surtax."

 In short, I propose putting a 50% surtax -- or maybe it should be 75%, I'm open to discussion -- on the post-government earnings of government officials. So if you work at a cabinet level job and make $196,700 a year, and you leave for a job that pays a million a year, you'll pay 50% of the difference -- just over $400,000 -- to the Treasury right off the top. So as not to be greedy, we'll limit it to your first five years of post-government earnings; after that, you'll just pay whatever standard income tax applies.

Sounds good to me.