Will Obamacare succeed where term limits failed?

[Lemur]

"At least he did something!" isn't a good defense. The status quo was bad. Obamacare is worse. Keeping the status quo isn't a long term solution, but it's better than what we have now by almost any measure.

The obvious long-term solution is implementing what every other industrialized nation on Earth has, which is some sort of single-payer system. I know that's not what Ayn Rand (who wrote the Constitution and gave birth to George Washington) would want, but it's the only system demonstrated to control costs while providing a baseline of health for citizens.

Because Obamacare is entirely derived from a Republican think-tank and Republican politicians, it addresses none of the underlying problems. It's still trying to pretend that national private-sector healthcare can work, a proposition for which there is zero evidence.

It will be interesting to see if a measure as watered-down as Obamacare can be implemented despite the nihilist opposition of Republican governors. Time will tell. You take the fialure and costliness of Obamacare as a given, as a priori truth that only madmen and ideologues might question. I'd suggest there's a bit more divergence of thought on the overall cost of it, coming from sources such as the CBO.

And anyway, you have no positive agenda to put forward, just Obamacare bad bad bad. You can't defend the status quo ante because it is indefensible, and the only changes you can suggest are Randian free-market solutions which have never been demonstrated to work in the real world. They have exactly as much evidence for their efficacy as communist economic theory and crystal-powered healing.

Obamacare is a very mild start on reining in some of the worst practices of health insurance. It doesn't go nearly far enough, but neither does it appear to be the flaming disaster you tangibly yearn for it to be.

And if this amounts to an "At least he did something" defense, I'd say it has more heft than your "Oh no he did something" offense.