As we watch the implosion of ObamaCare, it's striking how completely unprepared Democrats were for what's happening. It's not that no one warned them premiums would go through the roof, people would lose their coverage, people would lose their doctors, young healthy people would have little incentive to sign up. Conservatives spent the past three years predicting all of this.
There were plenty of people insisting that the economic model simply wasn't sustainable. You couldn't force people with pre-existing conditions into the same risk pool with everyone else and cause costs to go down. It's impossible. Democrats must have known that on some level or they wouldn't have put in the individual mandate. But they still seem to have been caught flat-footed when it actually happened.
Few predicted the problems with the web site, but that will ultimately prove to be the easiest of ObamaCare's problems to fix.
The real danger for liberals with ObamaCare is not just that they passed a law that isn't working as advertised. The truth is they do that all the time. The real danger is that they passed a law whose dysfunction directly touches the lives of so many Americans - meaning that in this case, the failures of big-government liberalism are plainly seen and known to everyone.
Big government functions in horrendous fashion with stunning regularity. The IRS abuses the rights of citizens. The State Department makes foolish deals with nasty regimes. Congress pisses away billions on subsidies that drive up food costs. Federal regulations add to the cost of gasoline while making it difficult to exploit natural resources on our own shores. The tax code wreaks havoc on the economy.
The difference is that, while you can read about all these problems if you're interested, and you definitely feel the effects of most or all of them in one way or another, you don't necessarily deal directly with the federal government on any of this. If the tax code depresses job growth, and you have trouble finding a job as a result, you know you're having a rough time but you might not make the connection directly. If the store down the street is raising its prices because taxes and regualtions are driving up its costs, you know you're paying more but you don't necessarily know why.
Not so with ObamaCare. If you got a cancellation notice from your health insurance company, you know exactly why. If you went on HealthCare.gov and by some miracle managed to get through to look at the plans that are available - and were shocked by the premiums, you know exactly how that happened.
And if you can no longer see the doctor you like or go to the hospital you prefer, there's no ambiguity about what caused it.
This is, in many ways, the ultimate example of liberals finally getting what they've really wanted all along. They're quite happy to throw money around Washington, grease the palms of special interests and harass businesses via the regulatory regime. Sure. They live for that. But what they really want is to exert directly control over the choices people make in their lives, and ObamaCare is their most complete victory yet in the quest to do that.
And it's a total disaster. People who voted for Obama because they thought they were going to get easy access to affordable health care are discovering that they're getting exactly the opposite. They don't need to turn on cable news and watch dueling pundits debate who won and who lost here. When you're sitting there holding a cancellation notice in your hand, you know who lost. You.
This completely changes the dynamics whenever liberals tell the public, Put us in charge of that and trust us to give you what you need!
Up until now, a lot of people who were not doctrinaire liberals thought that sounded better than trusting evil greedy capitalists. Now? "Right, you mean just like with ObamaCare? No thanks!"
It's no longer just a Republican talking point that the government is inept and inefficient, and that liberals lie when they promise you things. It's everyone's real-life experience. When your entire political philosophy is based on the notion that government can deliver the goods better than the private sector, and this is what you did with your big chance to prove it, how can you come back from that?
Unless the Republican Party is so inept at making this point that they let the Democrats off the hook entirely, I don't think the left can come back from it. This was their shining dream, they got it, and it proved to be a fiasco. This should have the effect of burning the foundations of liberalism to the ground for a generation or more. Not only that, but it should make it easier for conservatives to make the argument that other social programs that are putting us into massive debt are not good policies either.
The failure of ObamaCare should serve to put Democrats on the defensive with respect to any proposal that claims big government can intervene in people's lives and do great things. That goes for the re-examination of existing programs as well as any proposal for new ones. ObamaCare should be the millstone that's hung around Democrats' necks for a very long time, not only because that would be smart politics, but more importantly because ObamaCare is the proof that big-government liberalism does not work.
