{"id":6745,"date":"2013-11-13T14:52:22","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T22:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6745"},"modified":"2013-11-13T14:52:22","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T22:52:22","slug":"obamacare-is-dead-long-live-obamacare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamacare-is-dead-long-live-obamacare\/","title":{"rendered":"Obamacare Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare!"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO’s The Corner<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In the next 90 days, the Obama administration will have to declare victory and then abandon most \"Photoof Obamacare.<\/p>\n

The legislation defies the laws of physics\u2014more and broader coverage for more people at\u00a0less\u00a0<\/em>cost\u2014as well as logic: Young people, on average as a cohort with higher debt and less employment, will pay more for coverage they do not use much to subsidize others, often better off, to pay less for coverage they use a lot. It will be interesting how the administration pulls it off, given its past record of often being successful at this sort of dissimulation.<\/p>\n

The \u201cPatient Protection and Affordable Care Act\u201d\u2014despite the euphemistic name, the legislation has caused millions to lose their coverage and upped the costs for millions more\u2014is a stone around the necks of Democratic congressional candidates, and something political will have to be done within the next year to address it. The Obama administration\u2019s first impulse will probably be haphazard and periodic non-compliance with the law in the manner of its treatment of the employer mandate, and, for that matter, all sorts of other \u201csettled\u201d legislation that, for political reasons, it simply chose not to enforce, from pre-election border enforcement and the Defense of Marriage Act to the contractual order of the Chrysler creditors.\u00a0In that regard, the administration might table the individual mandate or administratively change the wording of required insurance protocols to let people keep their old plans that were recently dismissed as \u201cbad apples\u201d or \u201cjunk.\u201d Maybe they could call all that \u201cpro-choice,\u201d or \u201cgood apples.\u201d<\/p>\n

A second and previously popular Obama strategy\u2014cf. the war on terror rebranded with \u201cworkplace violence,\u201d \u201clargely secular,\u201d \u201cman-caused disasters,\u201d and \u201coverseas contingency operations\u201d\u2014would be just to scrap most of the law and keep a tiny sliver like the front-ended goodies (such as not losing your insurance for preexisting conditions or keeping children on parental plans until 26) and restamping that tiny change as the old Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,\u00a0while quietly dismantling the program piecemeal.<\/p>\n

Each time Obama has had to square the circle\u2014e.g., keeping or expanding the hated Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols while still demagoguing them\u2014he has resorted to philology and simply changed the meanings of things. He will probably tell us the naked health-care emperor is fully dressed in the way that the tenfold expansion of the drone program was a legacy of Bush, or the willingness to exceed the U.N. in Libya, ignore it in Syria, and undermine it with Iran is \u201cworking with the UN.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see as viable the third, and no doubt favored, solution: a stealth attempt by fiat to implement a single-payer system. Assuring the people that the problem with Obamacare was not enough government rather than too much does not seem like a winner. Somehow the Obama administration took public distrust of insurance companies and transmogrified that suspicion into greater distrust of government. And when they talk of drafting techies to the rescue of the website, they seem not to be talking about more GS somethings, but hip Silicon Valleyites from the correct part of the private sector. For now there can be no more presidential sweeping statements about not losing this or not paying more for that, but probably silence, as administration lawyers administratively chart non-compliance strategies and the usual politicos find ways to call that a smashing success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO’s The Corner\u00a0 In the next 90 days, the Obama administration will have to declare victory and then abandon most of Obamacare. The legislation defies the laws of physics\u2014more and broader coverage for more people at\u00a0less\u00a0cost\u2014as well as logic: Young people, on average as a cohort with higher debt and less […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[278],"tags":[1064,40,856,677],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1KN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6705,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamacare-and-human-nature\/","url_meta":{"origin":6745,"position":0},"title":"Obamacare and Human Nature","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner Obamacare was predicated on the idea that it would be techie-driven and noble in inspiration, and therefore, presto, just had to work. But the entire program, whether one likes it or not, assumes things that simply are contrary to human nature, and therefore,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6799,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/affordable-care-of-patient-protection-or-obamacare\/","url_meta":{"origin":6745,"position":1},"title":"Affordable Care or Patient Protection or Obamacare?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 There are some rumors that the administration wants to distance itself from the slang \u201cObamacare,\u201d a term the president embraced in the 2012 campaign but now finds hurtful to his polls and his colleagues in the Congress. But what would be alternatives? We\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6778,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamacare-speak\/","url_meta":{"origin":6745,"position":2},"title":"Obamacare-Speak","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Obama administration is altering its language like there's no tomorrow. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The Obama administration once gave us \u201cman-caused disasters\u201d for acts of terrorism and \u201cworkplace violence\u201d for the Fort Hood shootings. Now it has trumped those past linguistic contortions by changing words to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6659,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/new-coke-health-care\/","url_meta":{"origin":6745,"position":3},"title":"New Coke Health Care?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 The president has compared the rollout disaster of Obamacare to temporary tech glitches with a new-model iPhone. But a better comparison is the disastrous 1985 campaign to replace Coca-Cola with \u201cNew Coke,\u201d a new sweeter formula that was supposed to stop Pepsi from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6643,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/where-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":6745,"position":4},"title":"Where Now?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 The government gridlock is, to use now politically incorrect metaphors, only one lost battle in a long campaign, and we are now back to the original proposition of watching the administration try to implement Obamacare. We know the president does exceedingly well when\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6858,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obamacare-generation\/","url_meta":{"origin":6745,"position":5},"title":"The Obamacare Generation","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The ACA depends on Millennials picking up the tab -- as they already are for other entitlements -- in the midst of a bad economy. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 There are all sorts of time bombs embedded within Obamacare. Will we force doctors to treat the millions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6747,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6745\/revisions\/6747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}