Is Obamacare such a cluster-you-know-what that the law will self-destruct?
Well, I’ve already explained why I’m optimistic about the possibility of turning Obamacare lemons into free-market lemonade.
Simply stated, the law took a healthcare system that already was a mess because of government intervention and subsidies and it doubled down on that misguided approach!
And since it’s highly unlikely that more government is the solution to problems created by government in the first place, I think we’ll have great fun being able to highlight all the bad consequences of Obamacare and make a principled case for pro-market reform (meaning not only Medicaid reform and Medicare reform, but also tax reform to help deal with the third-party payer crisis).
That being said, I don’t think Obamacare will collapse on its own. We’re going to have to give it a push. A big push.
This is because legislation will be required to undo all the taxes and subsidies in the law. And even though we have the bizarre situation of the Obama Administration deciding to deliberately ignore a legal requirement to impose an employer mandate beginning in 2014, we’ll also need legislation to undo both the individual and the employer mandate.
In other words, the fact that the law won’t achieve any of its goals (such as lower costs and universal insurance coverage) won’t cause the bad policy to disappear.
But it will make the law even more unpopular – particularly if we do our job.
That’s why we should relentlessly highlight examples of wasteful Obamacare spending. The Washington Post, for instance, is reporting on “the extreme measures states are taking to get young people signed up for Obamacare programs.”
And when even the Washington Post thinks politicians and bureaucrats are going above and beyond in their efforts to waste money, you know it’s something especially foolish. But when you’re trying to trick young people into signing up for insurance policies designed to subsidize richer seniors, you don’t really have much choice.
Oregon might do branded coffee cups, for example, whereas Seattle is looking at doing outreach at music festivals. It only makes sense, then, that Kentucky would be doing outreach at multiple bourbon festivals across the state.
From a big picture perspective, this type of waste in just a penny or two on the dollar, but it’s very symbolic of a law that is poorly designed and unworkable.
One final warning. We’re not guaranteed of victory simply because Obamacare is leading to bad results. The statists are going to try and seize control of the narrative by asserting that the higher costs and greater inefficiencies could be fixed by squandering more money in the short run and imposing a single-payer system in the long run.
That’s a very perverse example of Mitchell’s Law and it surely doesn’t make sense to normal people. But it’s an approach that plays to the worst instincts of politicians, many of who will grab any excuse to increase the size and scope of Washington.
