Jacob Sullum: Maybe the Obama Administration Should Look in the Mirror

Jacob Sullum (who is a columnist for Reason Magazine article and is the editor for the article that Kerwyn and I have written on the Tonya Craft case), has a great column today pointing out just how much buck-passing goes on in government in general and the Obama administration in particular.

Jacob writes:

Two weeks ago, writing in The Washington Post, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius argued that Americans must be forced to buy government-approved medical coverage to prevent "unfair cost-shifting" by uninsured patients. They neglected to mention that the federal government mandates such cost shifting by requiring hospitals to treat all comers, regardless of their ability to pay.

Holder and Sebelius also misleadingly implied that the individual insurance mandate is aimed at addressing uncompensated care, which according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation represents less than 3 percent of health care spending. The main reason ObamaCare compels people to buy insurance is not so they can pay their own bills but so they can pay other people's bills. Since the new system requires insurers to cover everyone while forbidding them to charge sicker policyholders more, it needs to conscript people who hardly use health care so they can subsidize the expenses of people who use it a lot.

The Obama administration's refusal to acknowledge that coercion begets coercion when the government meddles in the health care market was one of the year's most memorable examples of blame shifting.

From there he goes to the latest McDonald's lawsuit (McDonald's does not help us enough in saying "no" to our children) to the TSA's excuse that they have to abuse us at airports because last year a Nigerian hid a bomb in his underwear (that did not go off, but did ensure that he would produce no future offspring).

Lest we think that our "betters" in Washington are going to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, perhaps the litany of excuses from Jake Blues as to why he jilted his fiance (played by Carrie Fisher) will better describe the Washington blame-shifting culture: