I hate this, but I’ve warned of it before (and taken a lot of heat for it), and now Ramesh Ponnuru is saying much the same thing as I and others have:
The public is right to dislike Obamacare. It has achieved, at great expense, an expansion of health-insurance coverage, but much of this coverage is of a very low quality. The most committed defenders of the law try to credit it with lowering the rate of growth in health-care spending. The attempt is risible: The trend toward lower inflation long predates Obamacare. The law has a poor cost-benefit ratio even before we consider all the coercion and disruption it has entailed.
For all Obamacare’s justified unpopularity, however, the political branches of the government are not going to repeal it so long as someone committed to it is in the Oval Office. It is not even going to be meaningfully reformed. What Republicans can and should do is to prepare the ground for the law’s repeal and replacement by increasing the likelihood that a president committed to a credible plan to achieve that goal will be elected in 2016 and have a congressional majority to support him.
That means eating some crap sandwiches between now and then, unpleasant as that will be.
Winning complete control of Capitol Hill was only the warmup act for 2016. Everything else must take second place, if we’re to remove this ♡bamaCare!!! albatross from around the country’s neck.
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