Obamacare: The Wrong Test

The core objection to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was never the glitchy website or the deficient number of sign-ups. (It you subsidize it, they will come.) It was the predictable harm of combining government-subsidized demand, controlled supply through administered pricing, and mandated standardized insurance products (i.e., a "market" without entrepreneurship and full, free competition). These consequences will take time to reveal themselves, but they will do so in due course. The laws of economics guarantee it. (Note: Obamacare merely intensified the antimarket features of the reigning corporatist system.)

Ignoring the real objection has distorted the debate and set the success bar absurdly low.