“The Obamacare We Deserve”?

TODAY marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.
That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get.
…
I believe Obamacare’s rocky start — clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could — is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. When right-wing critics “expose” the fact that President Obama endorsed a single-payer system before 2004, they’re actually telling the truth.

(Michael Moore, The Obamacare We Deserve, in the New York Times)

You knew that was coming, didn’t you? I don’t really think that Team Obama deliberately screwed up implementation in order to push us toward “a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model,” but that’s where we’re headed unless the GOP can come up with a better idea. And since Obamacare, born in Boston as Romneycare, is itself (give or take an abortifacient mandate or two) a conservative think-tank’s proposed fix for a broken system, I’m not holding my breath.

By the way: single-payer, implemented by Democrats, will make the Hyde Amendment and its kin the deadest of dead letters, and challenges as to the abortifacient mandate will have a much steeper, and probably insurmountable, barrier to success – analogous to the losing cause of protesting paying taxes that fund war.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.