For Five Years Ross Douthat Has Been Claiming Obamacare≠RomneyCare, and That the Marketplaces-Exchanges Are Not the Heritage Foundation's Intellectual Child
But now, apparently, it is finally time to strip of the mask and acknowledge what he has been pretending for five years is not so:
Ross Douthat: Obamacare: The Obamacare exchanges… are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform…. 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… [push for] Medicare… to 55- to 65-year-olds and Medicaid… [to] even more. Meanwhile, the task for serious conservative reformers… become[s] harder, because they would have to explain how their plan to build an effective, exchange-based marketplace differed from the Obama White House’s exchange fiasco.
So while Republican politicians may be salivating over a potential Obamacare crisis, the conservative policy thinkers I know are not. They’re hoping, as I’m hoping, that this isn’t as bad as it looks. The chance to say “I told you so” is always nice, but not if the price is a potentially irrecoverable disaster.
Could you have made a difference, Ross, if you had spent the last five years telling your copains of the right that ObamaCare=RomneyCare? Yes, you could have. But you didn't, did you?