By Craig Andresen Right Side Patriots http://www.americanpbn.com/

While everybody remains laser-focused on the 2016 candidates, one of the major issues of this election is, by and large, going unnoticed or drastically under reported…Obamacare.

Last week, Mandy Cohen, a senior official in the Obama regime’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, stonewalled a congressional committee regarding the future of Obamacare’s 11 remaining co-ops but she did admit one thing…

That those 11 of the original 23 co-ops are in big trouble financially.

How deep is the hole in which they currently find themselves?

Deep. Very, VERY deep.

In fact, 8 of the 11 could well go under by the end of this year and each of those 8 are now facing either “federal enhanced oversight,” or are currently operating under a “federal “corrective action plan.”

But there’s more…plenty more…

Throughout the hearing before the Congressional Committee, Mandy Cohen steadfastly refused to divulge which 8 of the 11 are so deep in the whole that they are in serious and probable danger of collapse.

To be clear, those “corrective action plans” and “enhanced oversight” systems are not free. They cost billions of taxpayer dollars. For the record, the 12 co-ops that have already failed were under those measures before they folded, and the price tag to the American taxpayers for those failed efforts reached nearly a billion and a half dollars while the price tag, so far, regarding the remaining 11 is sucking away at least that much again and the money from our pockets, as in bailout funds, is still flowing like an open tap.

But lest you think that money is flowing to hospitals, clinics or doctors who have provided care under the jack-booted mandates of Obamacare…think again.

Who is first in line when it comes to the money We the People put up or more accurately, have had stolen from our pockets?

The Government…because the government “loaned” itself $2.5 billion of our taxpayer dollars to start the co-ops that are now failing across the country.

And if there’s any left over after we bail out the government for their gross mishandling of a forced upon us, unconstitutional, legislated from the Supreme Court bench debacle called Obamacare…who gets to decide who does or does not get paid?

Well, that would be Loretta Lynch and the Obama regime’s Department of Justice.

Nice little set up they have there…isn’t it?

Not only are the co-ops failing, one after another, but enrollment in socialismcare apparently isn’t going that well, as Cohen also refused to divulge any of those figures either, probably because the Obama regime simply hasn’t had time to cook the books on it yet.

Here’s the bigger problem than the money being stolen from taxpayers to cover for this epic failure…

As co-ops close their doors…Americans insured by them suddenly have to go back on the hunt for a new insurer. Let’s say you were insured by co-op “A” and it closed down. You went looking and wound up being insured by co-op “B”. Then it too went under. Co-op “C”…”D”…”E”…where does it stop?

Be assured, all of this has an escalating effect on the cost of health insurance, as the fewer and fewer co-ops there are, the less and less people there are with insurance which drives the cost of insurance and all its components such as deductibles and prescription costs higher and higher.

So, amid all the doom and gloom, why wasn’t Mandy Cohen more forthcoming with information to the Congressional committee last week?

Because it’s all going according to the Obama regime’s plan.

Obamacare was designed to fail and it is doing exactly that. The liberals wrote and passed a law that would necessarily fail, and remember…it was ONLY the democrats in congress that voted for this abject failure, as not a single Republican voted for it in either the House or the Senate…so as to usher in an outcry for what it was that Obama really wanted…a single payer 100% government operated and taxpayer paid for healthcare system.

Universal healthcare…just what Obama has wanted all along, and for that matter, exactly what Hillary wants…what Sanders wants and exactly what Donald Trump is on the record and on videotape calling for should he win the White House. Universal healthcare, where everybody is covered and, as Trump says, “the government will pay for it.”

Here’s the dirty little secret that none of the proponents of Universal healthcare want to talk about.

While Obamacare has been the single largest tax increase in American history…as a tax increase, it will pale compared to universal healthcare.

In order to institute universal healthcare, taxes will have to be hiked into the stratosphere because the real dirty trick being played on the American voters…on the low information American voters who support the candidates who are on the record as proponents of universal healthcare is that government pays for nothing.

There is not a single thing that government does that the government pays for. Not the roads. Not the bridges. Not the common defense. Not the general welfare. Nothing. Government doesn’t pay government worker’s salaries, doesn’t pay for the cost of enforcing regulations, doesn’t pay for treadmills for shrimp, doesn’t pay for toilet paper in government office building bathrooms and won’t be paying for universal healthcare either.

We do. The American taxpayers pay for every little thing government does or provides…from Obama phones to bail outs, from the “free” tuition the ilk of Sanders stumps for to “federal enhanced oversight,” and “federal “corrective action plans,” we, the American taxpayers…pay for it all and we’ll be paying through the nose for universal healthcare if any of them, Hillary, Sanders or Trump make it to the White House.

Not only will our taxes go up, and up, and up, but our ability to make medical decisions with the doctors we liked but could not keep under Obamacare will diminish to zero as those decisions will now be made between doctors and unelected government bureaucrats only. Ultimately, the level of care we receive will be determined by government bureaucrats, dictated to doctors who will no longer be in private practice or work for hospitals because they will be owned, just like the hospitals…by the government and their overhead will be paid for…by raising taxes.

For those who really want to see universal healthcare in action, as implemented by the U.S. government…look at the Veterans Administration and then tell me that you want VA style healthcare for yourselves, your family and for everybody in this country.

The VA, and the mess they’re in, with extreme waiting lines, a lack of doctors, people dying due to inadequate treatment or a complete lack of treatment and nobody is being held responsible is a microcosm of what we can expect when 350 million Americans become subjected to the exact same governmental bureaucratic oversight regarding our healthcare.

On what is arguably THE most important domestic issue of this 2016 campaign, Obamacare, would we, as Conservatives and Republicans rather have a president, going into 2017, when the failure of Obamacare is nearly complete, who has steadfastly stood against every aspect of Obamacare and who has a market-based health insurance plan ready to implement and who would proactively act with Congress to have congress repeal every last word of Obamacare or are we willing to take a chance on someone who is on the record, on videotape advocating for universal healthcare that he says the government will pay for but that we know WE will pay for, who only changed his tune recently, to mirror that of the stalwart anti-Obamacare candidate?

I will stand with the candidate or candidates with a long and steadfast history of being against everything Obamacare, and a long history of being 100% against any form of universal healthcare but I will not stand with one whose long history shows him advocating for the very thing we cannot afford in this country, and who only altered his position when he recently put an “R” behind his name for the purpose of political expediency.

Simply put…changing one’s party affiliation for the purpose of self-agrandizement, does not alter one’s core ideology. It is nothing but the transparent tactic of a con man. Donald Trump has always been an advocate of a single payer, universal healthcare system where, as he has said, the “government will pay for it,” and I guarantee you he will revert directly back to that position if elected.

REMINDER!!!

TODAY…Wednesday, March 2nd, from 2 to 4pm, Right Side Patriots Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss ObamaCare’s role in the 2016 election, expose Donald Trump for the phony that he is, and give their take on Super Tuesday.

Hope you can tune in at: americanpbn.com