2014 Will Be Even Worse For Our President

It's true that Obamacare has been a debacle, wrapped in a catastrophe, shrouded in a disaster. But it's also become clear that it was founded upon a lie: Obama's "if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it" statement was named by PolitiFact its lie of the year for 2013. Many Americans have already learned that their individualplans are being cancelled because they don't live up to Obamacare, causing enough chaos that the Obama administration has had to give certain people a last-minute "waiver" of the mandate that they buy insurance. But many more problems have just been kicked down the road -- into 2014 -- by Obama's unilateral decision. Ironically, the White House and Democrats were, just a couple of months ago, calling Republicans who wanted to delay the mandate anarchists and terrorists, and loudly proclaiming that Obamacare was "the law of the land."

Regardless, the mandate delay doesn't solve problems, it just kicks the can down the road. And, as Bloomberg's Megan McArdle notes, the White House seems to be reacting to short-term political problems, rather than shoring up the system in ways that will make it work better:

However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that. ... This is at best, damage control. Which suggests that the administration is expecting a fair amount of damage.

I think that's right, and the damage will come in 2014. What we've seen so far, most likely, isn't the worst of it.

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