Charles C. W. Cooke:
In the past fortnight, Obamacare’s health-insurance exchanges have delivered the “third world experience” that critics predicted they would. Indeed, so bad has the “trainwreck” rollout been that even staunch allies of the president and his agenda have felt compelled to admit disaster.
As the Daily Kos’s Jed Lewison observed earlier, conservatives who have full-scale ideological objections to Obamacare should be careful about focusing too much on these technical failures because, with time, those “glitches” may well be resolved, rendering local criticism moot. Lewison is correct: Conservatives oppose Obamacare for a host of good and important reasons, and they must continue to hammer these home above other complaints. Nevertheless, opponents should continue to point at the technical failure of the exchanges, and to remind the public that the launch was such a public disaster. Why? Because this will help against any attempt to parlay a broken program into single-payer.
This is to say that if Obamacare fails structurally, we will start to hear a drumbeat from the Left — and one based upon the argument that Americans can’t have workable universal healthcare while maintaining a diffuse system of private health insurance. Advocates will contend, I suspect, that the for-profit model simply cannot be reconciled with “fairness” and “social justice” and whatever other silly and vague words they choose, and that the government must take over the payment system in consequence. How much success this approach will have is anybody’s guess.
But if Obamacare fails technically, too, and the memories of trying for weeks just to create a government account linger in the minds of the public — perhaps even leading to an embarrassing delay — opponents will have been presented with a strong hammer with which to whack the single-payer mole for years to come. “The government couldn’t even run a website without it turning into the DMV,” they will be able to say. “Do you want them in charge of the whole damn thing?”
Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle has written well of progressives’
belief that Canada is not just some place that has made different choices about access and coverage than the U.S. has, but a sort of health-care utopia where any potentially lifesaving treatment is available to anyone at the drop of a hat … as if nationalizing the health-care system somehow means that you never have to make any difficult choices.
In fact, she observes:
In a world of scarce resources, choices always have to be made. In Canada, those choices are made by the government; in the U.S., by the government and corporations and individuals, depending on the choice.
As someone who lived for 26 years under single-payer — and is a staunch opponent as a result — I can vouch for this. And I am pleased that Americans still tend to have a negative view of single-payer systems.
By refusing to delay the individual mandate or the medical device tax, the Democrats in Congress will pay heavily at the polls in 2014, as the train wreck continues and the people realize how much of a debacle Obamacare will become.
democrats followed the leader like sheeps, yell that it was good for the PEOPLE, LOOK AT HOW THEY CARE FOR THE PEOPLE,
THEY WHERE READY FOR THE SHUT DOWN BEFORE IT HAPPEN, PREPLAN GESTURE TO PUNISH
THOSE WHO DARE TO CONTREDICT THEM WITH THE TRUTH AND ALL THE WORKING PEOPLE AND
THE VETERANS WHO HAD ENOUGH ABUSE
THEIR DIRT IS NOW FOR ALL TO SEE, and they demonize the MESSANGERS,
WITH WORDS COMING FROM THE SEWER
I have seen predictions that Obama will “magnanimously” delay the individual mandate prior to the 2014 elections – Ace had this prediction, I think. Dunno – we will see.
Even the WaPost has reported a massive decrease in the number of people going to the obamacare exchange website. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/visits-to-federal-health-care-web-site-off-88percent/2013/10/15/7a73f45c-35e2-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html
The number of visitors to the federal government’s HealthCare.gov Web site dropped 88 percent between Oct. 1 and Oct. 13, according to a new analysis of America’s online use, while less than half of 1 percent of the site’s visitors successfully enrolled for health insurance the first week.
And I have clearcut evidence that the media is absolutely fellating Obama and the democrats that no socialist can honestly argue against. We hear over and over and over from the MSM how hated and despised the tea party is with an unfavorable rating of 49%.
http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/16/tea-partys-image-turns-more-negative/
Yet Obama’s negative rating is at 52% according to Gallup – http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Job-Approval.aspx
So tell me again how someone with a HIGHER disapproval rating than the Tea Party is somehow not despised, while the Tea Party is allegedly the spawn of satan and responsible for all the current travails of the country?