Didn’t understand what was in it

Since the passage of ObamaCare, several major U.S. companies -- so far, they include AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, Deere, Valero Energy, AK Steel and 3M -- have announced that they expect the law to cost them billions of dollars in higher health care expenses.

This has prompted an angry Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and one of many Democrats who swore up and down that the measure would actually cut costs, to summon some of the executives to Capitol Hill to defend their assessment.

Rep. Waxman is also demanding that the executives give lawmakers internal company documents related to health care finances, a move one committee Republican describes to Byron York of the Washington Examiner as "an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents" of ObamaCare.

Perhaps these Democrats really are surprised ­-- perhaps (as Republicans consistently warned) they never actually read and comprehended what was in their nearly 3,000-page social engineering experiment.

"Most of these people (in the administration) have never had a real job in their lives," a senior lobbyist for one of the firms told the American Spectator over the weekend. "They don't understand a thing about business, and that includes the president. My CEO sat with the president over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the president what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the president didn't understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying."

Nor is this just coming from Republicans. One Democratic staffer affiliated with the Waxman committee told the magazine that neither Rep. Waxman nor Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individuals before they voted on the legislation.

"We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them," says the staffer. "When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them. ... They just didn't understand what they were voting on."

And it's only just begun.