A Failure In Progress

Because the Obamacare website is performing better than it did during its admittedly disastrous first weeks, and because congressional Democrats have not defected in the numbers that would have put the law’s near-term survival in question, supporters of the law believe that they have turned a corner. They are convinced that those of us who oppose the law can do no more than temporarily obstruct it, and that the benefits it is starting to bring to the American public will ultimately make it popular and then unchallenged.

In reality, Obamacare remains an unpopular law with deep flaws. It is performing much worse than the advocates predicted as recently as September. At the end of that month Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius told NBC Nightly News, “I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014.” It was last year that the Congressional Budget Office came up with that estimate for the number of people who would enroll in Obamacare’s exchanges. Nobody now expects the target to be hit. The administration is not touting that measure of success any more, and neither are its supporters — even after the supposed triumph of its “tech surge.”

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