Breaking Bad is the story of a seemingly well-intended but very misguided man who turned to cooking meth in order to amass enough wealth to provide for his family once he dies of cancer. The consequences of that unfortunate decision—not to mention the lies and deceptions to keep it on track—pyramid alarmingly over the course of five seasons, culminating in mayhem and a head-spinning body count.
Obamacare isn’t a TV drama. But it will unleash its own tsunami of unintended consequences: more than a million jobs lost, an economy increasingly made up of part-time workers, higher health spending (at least a half-trillion dollars just over the next decade), a decline in medical innovation (and attendant loss of life).
While Obamacare undoubtedly will do a modest amount of good, the urgent question is whether the law’s supporters will come to see that the good pales in comparison to the damage. Obamacare may still crash and burn (see Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988), or it may endure as a monument to government ineptitude and inefficiency (see U.S. Postal Service, whose deficit last year alone was $15.9 billion, despite being exempt from taxes, regulations, and even parking tickets!).
