Failure Of Failures

Could Obamacare end up as America’s worst domestic-policy disaster ever?

Indulge me if you will, and join me in imagining that Obamacare has taken the calamitous path of the Hindenburg and ended up as little more than a smoldering warning against hubris. Imagine, that is, that enrollment rates have remained dangerously low; that the risk pools consist largely of the elderly and the sick; that the insurance companies, unable to operate on the magical thinking of which the White House is so fond, are being forced either to get out of the market completely or to raise premiums dramatically; and that skittish Democrats have started to run away — first calling weakly for fixes, then hinting at more, and then barely resisting the temptation to follow the trail of the pitchforks and nullify the president’s signature achievement. Imagine, in other words, that things are bad.

Now answer me this: If such a scenario were actually to come to pass — and, of course, it most certainly has not as of yet — how serious a failure will we judge it to be? Will we see it as a hiccup? Will we claim that it is typical for a second term? Or will we consider it to be a calamity of historical proportions? Personally, I would plump for the lattermost: In my view, if Obamacare were to fail hard, it could well come to be seen as the most catastrophic domestic-policy enterprise of the last century.

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