A New Year and Old Problems
With Obamacare Americans will face a choice to be citizen or subject.


Thomas Sowell

Whenever we stand on the threshold of a new year we are tempted to forget the hazards of prophecy and try to see what may lie on the other side of this arbitrary division of time.




Obamacare looms large and menacing on our horizon. This is not just because of computer problems, or even because some people who think that they have enrolled may discover on their next visit to a doctor that they do not have any insurance coverage.

What Obamacare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts’s Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the Tenth Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.



What kind of man would blithely disrupt the medical care of millions of Americans and then repeatedly lie to them with glib assurances that they could keep their doctors or health insurance if they wanted to?

What kind of man would set up a system in which people would be forced by law to risk their life savings because they had to divulge their financial identification numbers to strangers who could turn out to be convicted felons?

With all the time that elapsed between the passage of Obamacare and its going into effect, why were the so-called navigators who were to be handling other people’s financial records never investigated for criminal convictions? What explanation could there be, other than that Obama didn’t care?

Caring is not a matter of words. “By their fruits ye shall know them” — not by their rhetoric, image, or symbolism.

Those who have still not yet seen through Barack Obama will have many more opportunities to do so during the coming year as the medical, financial, and other painful human consequences of Obamacare keep coming out in ways so clear that not even the mainstream media can ignore them or obscure them.


Obamacare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed even though it was a constitutional amendment that required supermajorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.

In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that Obamacare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn — citizens or subjects.



— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2014 Creators Syndicate, Inc.


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