Short-Sighted Conservative Gloating On Obamacare

Truth be told, some of the more interesting writing on the travails of the Obamacare enrollment system is coming from conservative Ross Douthat of the New York Times. On Sunday, he warned Republicans that their cackling over the enrollment mess was obscuring the realization that the Medicaid single-payer element of the Affordable Care Act was functioning better than the private insurance part of the insurance expansion:

[W]hile conservatives think the Obamacare exchanges are overregulated and oversubsidized, they are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform than the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which is happening no matter what transpires with Healthcare.gov. So if the exchanges fail and the Medicaid expansion takes effect (and, inevitably, becomes difficult to roll back), we’ll be left with an individual market that’s completely dysfunctional and a more socialized system over all.

In that scenario, the Democratic Party would probably end up pushing, not for the pipe dream of true single payer, but for a further bottom-up/top-down socialization, in which Medicare is offered to 55- to 65-year-olds and Medicaid is eventually expanded even more.

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