The anniversary we don't want to celebrate

Well, it’s time for a very special anniversary, honoring a time we all remember with great pride. Yes, it was a year ago that President Obama gave Congress an arbitrary deadline to pass his health-care takeover legislation before the Easter recess at the end of March. This forced lawmakers to hurry their votes on a deeply flawed bill that very few of them had read. Remember Nancy Pelosi telling legislators they could read it after they had signed it? We saw lots of false promises made during desperate attempts to secure final passage.

A recent essay in The Wall Street Journal highlighted what’s happened in the past year to ObamaCare. This is not pleasant reading to those who promised so much if only the bill would be passed. For the rest of us, this update will further harden our resolve to dump the entire mess and replace it with more sensible reforms. Here are a few examples of the chaos that has resulted from passage of ObamaCare.

• More than half the states—28 and counting—are challenging the law in court, saying that it violates the constitutional rights of their citizens and the sovereignty of the states. How can you force people to buy something they have determined they don’t need or want? The Journal reports that a new study from the Senate Finance and House Energy and Commerce Committees found that as a result of ObamaCare, budget-strapped states face at least $118 billion in unfunded mandates during the first 10 years after the law takes effect. This is horrifying to states already in trouble financially.

• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has handed out nearly 1,000 waivers to allow select companies, unions and states to escape, at least temporarily, some of the burdensome new insurance rules she has created. This is a continuation of the trend of the "Cornhusker Kickback" and the "Louisiana Purchase" that Senate Democrats used to get the law passed in the first place, and that so disgusted the American people. I thought we were part of a system where all were treated the same under the law.

• The Journal also states that independent experts have shown that the cost of health insurance will rise faster than it would have without the law. The Congressional Budget Office expects the price of a family policy in the individual market to be $2,100 higher by 2016 than it would have been had the law not passed. As an example of further financial burdens, in at least 20 states, it's now impossible to buy child-only health insurance because of Ms. Sebelius's bizarre new rules.

• For those of us aging (sigh), the Journal notes that seniors are at risk of losing access to physicians and medical care. Medicare actuaries say that the cuts built into the law will force as many as 40% of providers to eventually stop seeing Medicare patients or go bankrupt. No doubt new laws will be passed to prevent this—I wonder what they will look like.

• Many thousands of people are already losing the health insurance they have now as companies are exiting markets for individual, small group and Medicare Advantage coverage. Who can blame the companies? It was predicted this would happen.

• Probably the most horrific part of this disaster, according to the Journal, is an update from the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. He says that the costs of ObamaCare are set to explode when employers opt to drop coverage and send their workers to the new, federally subsidized health exchanges for coverage. He estimates that this will drive up the cost of the law by $1 trillion or more in the first 10 years. Again, this was predicted by opponents to this health-care scheme.

This is just part of the grim picture. We are facing a huge mess unless we force the current Congress to defund ObamaCare. Then, we must elect a President and Congress in the future that honors our love of choice and freedom in all aspects of our lives, including health care.