As we celebrate our nation’s birthday this week, it is important to remember and teach our children the Founding Fathers were declaring our independence, not creating a culture of dependence. (They also protested unfair taxation, but that is another story for another day.) This is an especially important lesson, given the Supreme Court’s ruling last week on Obamacare.

The ruling was both a disappointment and a blow to our freedoms. As we get further away from the ruling, reality will dawn on people, and we will be right back to where we were. The American people did not want or approve of Obamacare then, and they do not now. Americans oppose it because it will decrease the quality of our health care, raise taxes by over $500 billion, cut Medicare by over $500 billion, and, with a $1.76 trillion price tag, break the bank.

The President promised us our premiums would go down $2,500 per family per year if we passed his reform; family premiums increased 9 percent last year. President Obama promised us we could keep our plans and our doctors; as many as 20 million Americans will lose their employer-provided health plans. President Obama promised us he would “protect Medicare;” Medicare’s Chief Actuary says the Obamacare cuts to providers are “unrealistic” and not sustainable, and millions of seniors will lose access to Medicare Advantage plans and benefits. The President promised us he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle class families making less than $250,000 a year; Obamacare raises taxes on health plans, medical devices, prescription drugs, and employers, and 75% of the individual mandate tax will fall on the middle class. Over 20 million individuals will remain uninsured, and health care spending will be higher than it would have been if the law had not passed. President Obama campaigned against Hillary Clinton’s individual mandate and John McCain’s tax increase on generous health care insurance, and included both in Obamacare.

Amazingly, facing the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression, President Obama chose to create a new entitlement program when we cannot afford the ones we already have. Republicans like to go on television and say we are borrowing from our children’s and grandchildren’s future. We can throw those talking points out; we are hurting ourselves now. You know we are in trouble when the German Finance Minister rebuffs President Obama and basically tells him to clean up his own mess before offering advice to others. Even the Europeans feel they have the moral high ground to tell us to tackle our own debt problems; that’s like the town drunk telling you that you have a drinking problem.

Opposition to Obamacare will escalate for one simple reason; Obamacare is the most unpopular when people are thinking about it. Then-Speaker Pelosi said they had to pass the 2,000 plus page bill so we could find out what is in it. The President promised it would become more popular the more people learned about it. Yet, there has never been one day a majority of the American people wanted this massive government overreach that was forced on us by a party-line vote.

The Supreme Court should have protected our constitutional freedoms, but remember, it was the President who forced this law on us. I congratulate the Supreme Court on one thing; they were far more honest about Obamacare than President Obama was. They rightly have called it what it is – a tax.The Supreme Court has done something new; they have declared that President Obama can use the taxation power of the federal government to compel behavior. The federal government can even tax the lack of behavior. What’s next? Taxes on people who refuse to drive Chevy Volts or eat tofu? This is ridiculous.

In fact, the Court actually rewrote Obamacare to make it fit under the taxation clause. I don’t know how one defines legislating from the bench, but this seems pretty close. The Readers Digest version of the Supreme Court’s decisions last week is this – The Government can require proof of insurance, but not proof of citizenship.Here is the big picture situation in America today. Success used to be measured by how many people we could get off the government dole, but now, under President Obama, we measure success by how many people we can get on government programs. Indeed, food stamp rolls have increased by 70 percent since 2007, and yet the government is spending millions of taxpayer dollars on advertising and encouraging parties to enroll even more. There used to be a stigma to relying on the government, but now it’s celebrated. We have it 100 percent backwards in America today. We should celebrate people getting off food stamps, off Medicaid, and off government health care. The bottom line is that Obamacare eats into the spirit of independence that has made America great in the first place, and if we don’t repeal it soon, we will have more people riding in the cart than pulling the cart. We are at an inflection point in our nation’s history. We have to decide whether we want to revive our economy by growing the private sector or expanding the public sector, to continue our culture of self-reliance versus a culture of dependency, to provide our children with opportunity or a sense of entitlement, and to pursue the American model or give in to the European model.

Here is the crazy part – the federal government cannot pay for our existing entitlement programs. We have to reform those or they will crumble, and yet President Obama has created another one we cannot afford. Democrats are already attacking Republicans for turning down free health care. Here is a news flash. All of this government spending is not free. It is our money they are spending; it is our future they are destroying; and it is really not that far into the future. The credit card is maxed out, and the bank of China is closed.I have vowed not to implement Obamacare in Louisiana, especially creating the exchange and expanding Medicaid, because this November we’re going to elect a new President and a new Congress who will repeal and replace the terrible law. In Louisiana, our health department estimates the Medicaid expansion alone will cost our taxpayers $3.7 billion over the first ten years of implementation and will take 187,000 new enrollees off private insurance.

The Court’s decision is a reminder that elections do in fact matter. The left wing won the elections in 2006 and 2008, giving liberals full control of the House, Senate, and the White House. They used this power to force through a government takeover of health care that the public didn’t even want.

Now, the American people have an opportunity to reverse this course in November by electing Governor Romney and a Republican Senate. We have to stop complaining about the Supreme Court and deal with the real problem – which is President Obama. Obamacare has now been unmasked for what it really is, a massive tax increase to pay for a massive new federal entitlement program that we do not want and cannot afford.
If you are a small business owner, a middle-class taxpayer, or if you are worried about what Obamacare will do to the quality of your health care, or if you are worried about the fact that our government is headed towards insolvency – you have only one recourse – make President Obama a one-termer. Elections do matter; this one matters a lot.