ANALYSIS: FALSE. Modesty Could Have Averted the Anguish of Obamacare.

Megan McArdle writes:

The weakness of the mandate, like other flaws in the law, was politically necessary because the law was already quite unpopular, and its supporters couldn’t afford to alienate a single other voter. So they passed what they could and hoped to fix it later. However, the unpopularity of the law meant that there was a strong risk that they wouldn’t be able to fix it later, and indeed that is where we now find ourselves.

I don’t mean to suggest that the law has been an utter failure by the standards of its architects. They have not achieved anything close to universal coverage, but they did manage to reduce the number of uninsured people by somewhere between a quarter and a third. However, I think that if they had been a little less stuck on the idea of attacking every problem at once, they might have passed a less ambitious plan that would nonetheless have expanded coverage substantially, with far fewer risks to either the system or the Democratic Party.

It isn’t so much that McArdle is wrong on the facts, it’s that “modesty” and the “comprehensive reform” (to say nothing of “fundamental transformation”) desired by Progressives are mutually exclusive.