Nary a week goes by that we don’t learn about some new Obamacare horror story. You’d almost think the Congress hadn’t read the bill before voting on it! Jennifer Rubin quotes an Associated Press story that reveals that several million middle-class people will be eligible for nearly free insurance (free in the sense that taxpayers pick up the tab), “a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.”
Another twist: couples earning up to $64,000 will be eligible for Medicaid, formerly the medical program for poor people. Part of the reason for Obamafiasco is that the bill was rammed through Congress so hastily. But Rubin finds yet another reason for the disaster:
Still, one can’t help but think that the administration and Democratic Congress didn’t have a firm grasp of some basics in our existing health-care system. James Capretta, for example, responds to The Post’s Ezra Klein, who repeats some standard liberal tropes. Capretta explains that in criticizing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) Medicare reform plan, liberals seem to be confused about the highly successful Medicare Part D plan, which provided a model of a popular, market-oriented and subsidized health-care plan that came in under budget….
Those who drafted and now tout it have a shaky understanding of how markets operate and a built-in preference for top-down management. But it turns out that millions of people making individual health-care decisions are a lot smarter than the bureaucrats who constructed such a massive structure that no one can be expected to understand it and its consequences. Who knew?