What If Obamacare Is Popular?

Huffington Post contributor asks an extremely unlikely question. If liberals are reduced to fantasies like this, then they really are in trouble. I'd like to see an update. #UnicornRanches

As more and more people sign up for affordable insurance thanks to Obama Care, many Americans who have insurance (and many who are worried about losing it) will hear heart-rending firsthand stories about friends, colleagues and relatives with medical worries, who finally get insurance. That coalition is a lot more than 15 percent.

Many of these people, incidentally, are in red states, where the percentage of the uninsured tends to be far higher than the national average. In several such states, Republican governors have broken ranks and signed their states up for the provision of the Affordable Care Act that has the Federal government finance nearly all the costs of expanded Medicaid.

No wonder the Republicans are so desperate to kill Obamacare in utero. The more it takes effect, the more their hysteria will be proven to be a phony. By 2014, when the Republican House majority will present itself for re-election, the Affordable Care Act could be quite popular. What then?

President Obama, increasingly, finds himself in the chips. Let's see if this time he can resist the impulse to fold a winning hand.

Six weeks later, reality  intrudes upon Robert Kuttner's unicorn petting zoo. 

The ancient Greeks liked to say that character is fate.

The colossal mess that Obamacare has become reflects both the character of the legislation and that of the president who sponsored it.

The Affordable Care Act, as a government mandate for people to purchase private insurance with an array of possible subsidies, had too many moving parts. It was an accident waiting to happen.

As many of us wrote at the time, Medicare for All would be simpler to execute, easier to understand, and harder for Republicans to oppose. If doing Medicare for All in a single stroke was too heavy a lift, start with 60-year-olds, then 55-year-olds, then young people under 25, and fill in the qualifying age brackets over a decade.