Determined to turn us into totally dependent cattle - today's edition

Deroy Murdock has a piece at NRO today that tells you all you need to know about FHer-care: its labyrinthine bureaucracy, the slimy wiliness of the smiley-face representatives one deals with when embarking on the enrollment process, the utter disregard for individual sovereignty and privacy, and the overt attempt to maximize each comrade's dependency on Leviathan.

He tells the story of Helen, a 60-year-old widow who earns $15,000 a year as a self-employed house cleaner.  For her health care, she'd relied on a volunteer clinic at which doctors examined her and provided her with medicine free of charge.

Nonetheless, this lifelong Democrat considered it her duty to sign up for Obamacare. After all, it is the law. And Helen did not want to pay the penalty for violating the individual mandate.

So, last October, Helen visited HealthCare.gov and smacked into the same delays and diversions that have flummoxed so many Americans. She rang the HealthCare.gov help line and spoke with someone whom she described as sweet and friendly. The woman on the phone, who never gave her name, listened to Helen and then recommended that she seek public assistance.

“Public assistance?” Helen erupted. “That sounds like welfare. I raised my family my whole life and never took one penny of welfare — ever. Why would I want to take government aid now? This is why the system is the way it is today. I am an honest person, and this is why I am refusing welfare.” The woman kept firing questions at her. Helen felt as if the navigator wanted to derail her train of thought, break her down, and make her surrender and accept government aid.

Helen says the Obamacare navigator told her that she did not meet the criteria to qualify for Obamacare. Still, since Helen already had started the application, the navigator told her to complete it. This devoured another hour and 45 minutes. The application was filled with some three dozen deeply personal questions about her bank account, health condition, and even HIV status.

“I felt violated,” Helen said. “It was as if they thought I was a criminal.”

After two weeks, Helen received a letter. The federal government deemed her ineligible and denied her Obamacare.

It gets worse.  She called back to find out the regime had lost her paperwork.  After going though the process again, she discovered that her second navigator had, with stunning dishonesty, signed her up for Medicaid.

The story continues to  unfold from there, and it has at least a somewhat happy private-sector ending, but the overall point is that it examines what happens when an American citizen who insists on paying her own way in the world stands her ground against the socialist machine that just wants to put her on its thrift-shop health-care plan and be done with her.

The anti-Julia.