The Unenviable Next President

[Draggingtree]

Hoover Institute :

The Unenviable Next President

by Victor Davis Hanson

Monday, November 7, 2016

 

After a strange and divisive election season, November 8 is almost here—and it couldn’t have come soon enough.

Whoever wins will be in an unenviable position. The nation is in free-fall: current foreign policy, the economy, health care, and federal borrowing are not sustainable. Yet the needed chemotherapy, in the short-term, will have more excruciating side-effects than the pain of the growing cancer itself—ensuring that the next president will be hated as a cruel oncologist by his suffering patients, the public.

 

Take health care. Nothing President Obama promised about the Affordable Care Act ever came true—if indeed such assurances were ever intended to come true. Premiums did not fall by $2,500. In fact, they rose on average by $4,800. We did not necessarily keep our plans or our doctors. The ACA certainly did not lower the deficit—another one of Obama’s pledges.

 

The administration announced that Obamacare costs will climb even higher in 2017, perhaps by 25%. Health insurers once rushed into the market on crony-capitalist promises that the government would green-light their price hikes in a closed and monopolized market. But even they are now disabused and leaving in droves.