There is something wrong with the fact that most pro-Obamacare observers are calmly assessing the recent troubles and admitting error, while the opponents (okay, Megan McArdle) are now jumping on being right for the wrong reason without admitting any of the successes.
I will make the fast-one explicit: McArdle implicitly claims that the 2016 status quo is worse than the 2009 status quo. To which I call ideologically-motivated bullshit.
One day she may surprise me with a cogent explanation of why she thinks that to be true. Until then, I claim the reason is a residual desire to believe that government intervention can never do right. I say residual, because she has clearly abandoned that belief as a general principle, but libertarianism, like Communism, is a very tenacious meme in the original 1976 sense of the word.
Many of the strongest advocates for the ACA are liberals who were never that ideologically invested in the exchanges (the most troubled part of the new system) in the first place; in fact, many of them advocated a public option that now seems more important than ever. The most successful parts of the law are the regulatory changes and the Medicaid expansion, which was hobbled by the Supreme Court and Republican state governments, but is working great where it can. These were always the bits that liberals were most comfortable with.
The fight on the left was always over whether it was worth torpedoing the whole thing in hopes of a single-payer system magically materializing through heightening of contradictions. (Some of the lefty Kill The Bill advocates never really got this, as evidenced by their crowing about vindication now.)
Posted by: Matt McIrvin | September 07, 2016 at 06:18 PM