The parts of the Affordable Care Act that Obama Democrats really care about are working great. The ability to buy health insurance isn’t very important to them yet. That will become a serious political problem if the individual mandate comes crashing down on people who couldn’t possibly have complied with it, because the exchange system doesn’t work… but frankly, not even that is a fatal problem for the Democrats, unless Republicans are somehow able to build veto-proof congressional majorities out of it.
The name of the game at this point is keeping public outraged tamped down enough to keep Obama in office, and Democrats with enough congressional influence to keep ObamaCare alive. That.’s not a very high bar to clear. That’s why they felt free to lie copiously during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the 2012 campaign. There would be a price to pay for making fools of the American people – they get testy when they’re blatantly defrauded – but the Administration doesn’t have to worry about anything like the kind of fraud prosecution that would annihilate a private-sector company that pulled a scam like ObamaCare. As long as the anger can be controlled, the media doesn’t start treating them like Republicans, and the Democrats’ pet constituencies remain safely bought off, there is no existential political crisis yet. 2014 might be rough, but so was 2010, and the same brass ring remains firmly in the grip of the Left.
And just look at all the components of ObamaCare that are working! Most importantly, the machinery designed to wipe out private health insurance plans is humming along at full power. Another hundred thousand policies just went down in New York. (The total will actually be “much higher, because it doesn’t take into account hundreds of thousands covered under small business group policies that are being scrapped or rewritten to conform to the requirements of the Affordable Care Act,” according to the New York Post.)
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