I know a guy at Gold’s Gym who has a minor sports hernia. He says the injury is like a poultry pop–up timer, the kind you see on frozen Thanksgiving turkeys.

A turkey’s timer pops out of the carcass when it’s done and announces it’s time to take the bird out of the oven. My friend says his hernia works the same way: when his intestine pops out of the abdominal wall, he’s done and it’s time to leave the gym.

To avoid startling bystanders, he’s started wrapping up in an Ace bandage. He’s found it slims and tightens without messy creams.

You’re probably thinking this poor man is an official approved Obama victim. But he doesn’t qualify.

He’s not reduced to poking his parts back inside the abdominal wall because he spent $90/month on an iPhone instead of health insurance. And he’s not pitiful because he got this hernia for no good reason and now heartless insurance companies won’t sell him insurance when he could really use it.

The guy’s paid for his own insurance for almost 30 years.

The deductable is the problem. Government bureaucrats mandate what insurance policies must cover so he’s paying for pregnancy coverage, pap smears, chiropractors, mammograms and a whole host of maladies he will never have.

Even if an out–of–state insurance company offered him a great deal on insurance — pap smears and all — he couldn’t buy it because it’s illegal.

So he has a $5,000.00 deductable and a new Ace bandage every three months.

Outpatient surgery for a minor hernia won’t satisfy his deductible. So, like any price–conscious consumer, he called two hospitals to ask what this procedure cost and they laughed.

Genuine health care reform would give the patient more power and involve the free market. Hospitals and doctors would be required to post prices for comparison purposes and consumers could shop across state lines for customized health insurance policies that fit their situation.

But incremental change is not what big government Democrats want. It’s not new cabinet department enough, it’s not European enough and it won’t sound good in a campaign commercial.

Back when I was a Democrat and John Ensign was still faithful to his wife, I was the media consultant for his challenger. Ensign made an almost fatal mistake during a debate and admitted he doesn’t read bills “because they are written in legal language.”

Well guess what? Thirteen years later Mrs. Ensign is seeing a marriage counselor, but Senators and Congressmen still don’t read the bills and they don’t write the bills either.

Right now a common complaint regarding health insurance is its complexity. Obamacare’s socialized medicine will be Leviathan: colossal in size with all the individual pathologies that make dealing with the government so maddening. It will rival the tax code for complexity, opacity and sheer big government pettifoggery from day one.

And there won’t be the equivalent of TurboTax for Obamacare to insulate us from the complexity.

For patients, Obamacare will be like the FHA loan program designed to rehab and repair foreclosure homes for new owners. The Washington Post had a touching story about a local family that ran into roadblock after roadblock standing between them and a working toilet; including the petty bureaucrat who rejected their application because the homeowner used the word “sheetrock” instead of the bureaucrat’s “drywall.”

The solution? The family paid a few thousand dollars to hire their own, personal FHA consultant to negotiate the bureaucracy so they could get the loan approved.

This family’s FHA consultant will be similar to the consultant you’ll be hiring to fight for your CAT scan after the compassionate National Obamacare Diagnostic Outreach Community Specialist (NODOCS) assures you that a few thumps with a rubber hammer is all the diagnosis you really need.

Welcome to Obamacare. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Michael R. Shannon is a public relations and advertising consultant with corporate, government and political experience around the globe. He is a dynamic, entertaining and funny keynote speaker for corporate, non–profit and governmental organizations.