Like Frankenstein’s monster, Obamacare goes live today.  The behemoth will be alive, and it will take a lot of undoing to ever go back.

The upshot is that everyone will be forced to buy health insurance, or face a penalty tax, which starts at 1% of your annual income or $95 per person a year, whichever is higher.  That will increase over time, and by 2016 it will be 2.5% of your annual income, or $695 per person, whichever is higher.

So, we will all have to carry health insurance now.  Whether or not we get actual health care – that’s a different story.

Even as people are scrambling to decide what they can afford for care, looking on the exchanges, praying that they work enough hours to keep their employer health coverage, the tacit admission has finally come down from the media that President Obama lied – or, as Rick Klein so euphemistically put it, he made a pledge that was “never possible to keep.”

Generally, I would call that a lie.

The secret is out.  If you like your doctor, good luck on keeping your doctor.  If you like your health plan, good luck on keeping it.  Even if your doctor is still on your health plan, doctors are retiring at record rates to avoid dealing with the Obamacare monster.  Health insurance companies, now handcuffed by the regulations in the Affordable Care Act, are canceling plans right and left because these older plans are no longer “in compliance.”  Employers, faced with having to provide care for all full-time workers or pay penalties, are simply cutting employee hours or not hiring to avoid the impact on their bottom line – which, if they want to keep running a business and providing jobs, they absolutely must keep an eye on that bottom line.

And some of these plans on the exchanges are going to be a painful joke.  The deductibles for anything outside of your annual physical could be so astronomical that you won’t seek out health care, even when something is truly wrong, because essentially, your insurance won’t cover anything until you meet that deductible.  Which means every single health expense – every copay, every procedure, every lab test, and every surgery – is your responsibility until the deductible is satisfied.  So you have insurance, but it does you no good.  It’s little wonder that people are looking at the penalty tax, and then their wallet, to see if the risk of not having health insurance makes better financial sense.  And planning ahead?  Forget it.  Remember, your Flexible Savings Accounts are now capped at $2500.

I really hope the future of medicine does not turn into some kind of medical version of the DMV – someplace hellish, with long lines and terrible customer service where we are all required to go to and pay for the government services that we receive.  The only difference is that you can still choose not to go to the DMV.

As of today, you no longer have a choice about having health insurance.  And your choices about your health care are about to get severely curtailed.  I hope we all live through this.

UPDATE:  As of this afternoon, the computer servers handling the Obamacare exchanges, on both the federal and state levels, are experiencing either heavy enough traffic to crash, or are running into internal error messages. Don’t you just love government efficiency? They only had how long to prepare for this day?