"Politically where are we right now, at this moment?"

Peggy Noonan, WSJ editorial page:

It’s as if it’s 1964 and the administration has just passed landmark civil rights legislation and the bill goes into effect, and....It doesn’t help minority groups – it makes their lives harder and less free! And it does real, present and intimate damage to the majority.

It’s as if it’s 1937 and they launched Social Security, only rich coupon-clippers on Park Avenue immediately started getting small monthly checks, and 67-year-old dust bowlers in tarpaper shacks started getting monthly bills.

In other words, "ObamaCare is a practical, policy and political disaster, a parlay of poisonous P’s."

We can also play the "P" game. Critics of ObamaCare opposed it on the grounds of

principle: government takeover of a major sector of the economy,

privacy: as in loss of, especially since the IRS would administer it,

practicality: the government is not able to run something this big without turning it into the post office or DMV,

price: cost estimates were low-balled by hundreds of $billions.

All the criticisms made sense, but the one that resonated the strongest was the practical: I just didn't see how they were going to make it work. From July, 2009:

the current [healthcare] system is deeply flawed, yet, based on the government's recent performance in the comparatively simpler task of reviving the economy, have no confidence that the cure will be better than the disease.

© 2013 Stephen Yuen