Category: Barack Obama

Megan McArdle recounts the basic case:

In a nutshell, Obamacare has so far fallen dramatically short of what was expected — technically, and in almost every other way. Enrollment is below expectations: According to the data we have so far, more than half of the much-touted Medicaid expansion came from people who were already eligible before the health-care law passed, and this weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the overwhelming majority of people buying insurance through the exchanges seem to be folks who already had insurance. Coverage is less generous than many people expected, with narrower provider networks and higher deductibles. The promised $2,500 that the average family was told they could save on premiums has predictably failed to materialize. And of course, we now know that if you like your doctor and plan, there is no reason to think you can keep them. Which is one reason the law has not gotten any more popular since it passed.
The administration and its supporters have been counting on the coverage expansion to put Obamacare beyond repeal. So what if the coverage expansion is anemic, the plans bare-bones, the website sort of a disaster? It’s a foundation upon which we can build — and now that so many people have coverage, the thinking goes, Republicans will never dare to touch it. The inevitable problems can be fixed down the road.
But it’s far from clear that this is true . . .

Read the whole thing.

ObamaCare is exactly the kind of policy failure its opponents predicted, although it has also failed in a few unpredicted ways. The only way anyone can call ObamaCare a “success” is in a political sense, i.e., it helped re-elect Obama. We might also say ObamaCare is a “success” in the sense that its unmistakable failure will likely be leveraged as an argument for a single-pay government takeover of health care in some future Democrat administration, but we have not yet reached that point. Where we are now is Ezra Klein and other liberals trying to pretend that ObamaCare’s failure is not yet certain:

Ezra Klein is back in line. The Journolist founder, who now runs Wonkblog for the Washington Post, took some flak from other left-liberal journalists last year when he acknowledged that the ObamaCare exchanges had serious technical flaws. But now, as we move into Phase 3 of the ObamaCare failure — the unraveling of its economic assumptions — Klein and his wonkblogger staff are in full denial.

James Taranto’s recounting of the arguments is amusing, with Ezra Klein in the role of the Monty Python pet shop owner who insists that the Norwegian Blue is merely “pining for the fjords.”

A Republican congressman says it’s been nearly a month since he and 33 colleagues offered to meet with President Obama to discuss health care reform, and they still haven’t heard back from the White House.

“In the wake of Obamacare’s numerous failures, President Obama said that if Republicans had better health care reform ideas, they should say so,” Arkansas Rep. Tim Griffin said in a statement Wednesday. “That’s why 33 of my colleagues and I sent him a letter that included a list of nine proposals that would help build an open and innovative healthcare system, expand access, increase choice, and lower costs.  So far, our request for a meeting to discuss these ideas has been met with silence.  I hope President Obama meant what he said and will meet with us.  It’s not too late for a fresh start, so we can get real health care reform right.”

On Dec. 3, Obama challenged critics of his program: “If you’ve got good ideas, bring them to me. . . . [If] you still think this law is a bad idea then you’ve got to tell us specifically what you’d do differently to cut costs, cover more people, make insurance more secure.”

A week later, on Dec. 10, Griffin and 33 other GOP House members responded with a letter to the President highlighting nine separate areas of reform on which Republicans agree. “We appreciate your offer to discuss alternative proposals,” the letter said, “and we look forward to meeting with you at your earliest convenience.”

So far, apparently, that “earliest convenience” hasn’t arrived.