The Affordable Healthcare Act, also known as Obamacare is recognized as the signature plan of President Barack Obama as well as the Democratic Party who hurriedly passed the over 1,000-page law without one single Republican vote.
 
But now this law, with its dubious beginnings is seen by a majority of Americans as an embarrassment and a dismal failure.
 
However, no one person can take responsibility for botching one sixth of the American economy by themselves. It takes teamwork, planning and a whole lot of effort on the part of like-minded individuals.
 
Make no mistake; Senator Charles Schumer has done some good things for his constituents. And there is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Schumer was an absent politician who didn’t vote on significant issues. On the contrary, many identify Senator Schumer as central to issues of the Democrat Party as well as being intimately involved in the workings in the Senate.
  However, by casting his vote to pass Obamacare, Schumer is as responsible for the new law as President Obama. Schumer now fully owns the damage that has befallen his constituents and it far outweighs any of his past votes on items that benefited his constituents. Of what good was it for Schumer to improve roads and playgrounds when he also voted for a law that would force millions to lose healthcare coverage many were happy with, into higher costing plans squeezing mostly the middle class into further financial uncertainty.
 
Minor details in the bill aside, and absent the weak excuse that nobody can read every single bill, one can rightly conclude that Senator Schumer would never vote on a monumental piece of legislation where he didn’t understand all of the major parts, especially inside the kind of legendary legislation such as Obamacare. In an October 31, 2013 article in Forbes magazine it states, “If you read the Affordable Care Act when it was passed, you knew that it was dishonest for President Obama to claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” as he did—and continues to do—on countless occasions. And we now know that the administration knew this all along. It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market. Aside from the fact that every word in a bill that had such far reaching and historical impact on 300 million Americans should have been understood before any vote took place. Are we to believe that President Obama also lied to Democrat Senators regarding the eventual cancelation of insurance?
 

Perhaps anything is possible but then how do we explain that on November 17th during an ABC interview, New York Democrat Senator Kristen Gillibrand, stated, “We all knew,” referencing how others were fully aware that Obamacare would result in insurance cancellations which highlights the fact that everyone knew that the President outright lied to the American people?
 
The fact that Obamacare would cause Schumer’s constituents, the people who voted and supported him, to receive an unwelcomed surprise regarding their insurance cancelation notices was not a small detail but a gigantic and essential piece of the law that all of his supporters should have been warned about. Not only did Schumer not let his constituents in on Obama’s lie but according to a November 15, 2013 Washington Examiner report, Schumer also told his constituents they could keep their insurance if they liked it.

What seems to have been lost amid the smoke and mirrors of scandals and lies is the fact that Obamacare is the single biggest tax hike on the middle class in history. That doctors as well as insurance companies are beginning and will continue to drop coverage and care to a massive amount of people and that the middle class citizen will be saddled with higher insurance costs in order to pay for services they don’t want or need and all of it predicated on a lie.
 
So perhaps, on a local level, the most disturbing question regarding the Obamacare disaster is why after reading the bill prior to casting his vote for it and after hearing the President lie to the American people over 30 times in a 3-year period, Schumer stayed silent?

**The views expressed in this column represent only those of the author and not the board or membership of the Juniper Park Civic Association.