**Posted by Phineas

Remember how the Democrats pushed and pushed to ram through Obamacare as fast as they could, despite huge public opposition? So fast, most didn’t even bother to read the bill before voting on it? So fast, the Senate had to use “Rube Goldberg” procedures to pass it? So fast, Nancy Pelosi said they’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it?

Those were the days, my friends.

But, now that they’ve found out about at least one part, the idiotic “medical devices tax,” Democrats, especially those from states where the medical device industry is important, are joining with Republicans to repeal it:

The Senate gave sweeping bipartisan approval Thursday to a proposal by Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., to put senators on record in favor of repealing a tax on medical devices – a key part of President Obama’s controversial health care law. The Hatch-Klobuchar amendment to the GOP budget plan is the latest effort to roll back the tax that applies to a range of medical products, from surgical tools to heart devices. It’s among several taxes in Obama’s 2010 health care overhaul. The amendment passed the Senate by a vote of 79 to 20. The bill that it was attached to did not pass, but the sponsors used it as an opportunity to rally support for repealing the tax — as well as a separate bill they’ve introduced to achieve that. “Today, bipartisan members of the Senate spoke loudly and clearly that this tax on medical devices simply must go. It is a drain on innovation, on job creation and on our ability to provide ground breaking medical technologies to patients,” Hatch said in a statement. The Affordable Care Act levies a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices with the goal of raising nearly $30 billion over the next decade.

The Obama administration, naturally, is opposed to repeal of the tax, because the money it is expected to raise is crucial to Obamacare’s funding. But Democratic senators from vulnerable seats don’t want to have to explain to angry voters why their pacemakers and prosthetics cost more, or why the pace of innovation will slow, as the profits that would have been plowed back into R&D instead goes to the Treasury.

Expect this to happen more and more as the full weight of the PPACA kicks in. An already impossibly unwieldy law will become increasingly unstable as people demand unpopular taxes be repealed or find ways to avoid them, until the whole structure just collapses.

Of course, some would argue (and I would agree) that this collapse is an acceptable outcome to democratic socialists like Obama and Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowski, who think and hope that the turmoil caused will lead people to demand what the Left really wants: state-run single-payer health care.

Our job is to remind people every day that Obamacare is itself the problem, that the only solution to rising medical costs is a program of patient-centered, market-based reforms that remove the price distortions caused by government intervention and respects the liberty of the individual. If someone says that “Too late, Obamacare is set in stone, we can only tinker with it,” just give them a one-word answer: “Prohibition.”

Meanwhile, we can enjoy the spectacle of liberals like Senator Klobuchar running screaming from the monster they helped set loose.

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(Crossposted at Public Secrets)