If the ACA Fails

Bill,

If the ACA, which surely is in a heap of trouble right now, ultimately fails, it will not be because it limits choices (it does so for very few), or increases costs (that question is yet to be decided), or because it's too complicated. It will fail because it redistributes wealth from those who have it to those who don't. From Thomas Edsall's outstanding (and depressing, for your faithful correspondent) analysis in today's Times

 The Affordable Care Act “is often compared to Social Security and Medicare, but these comparisons are imprecise and misleading,” as Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, put it in an email: “The distinctive feature of the new health care law is its redistributive nature, which is mostly absent from Social Security and Medicare.”

Carmines went on, succinctly analyzing the political problem lying at the heart of Obamacare:

“Most of the benefits of the new program will go to the poor and less-well-off and most of the costs will be born by the well off. Neither is true of Medicare or Social Security. When the new law was passed it was hailed by The New York Times as the most redistributive policy in a generation, and they were right. It was not sold as being markedly redistributive, of course, but that is how it was designed and will operate. This does not mean it is a bad policy or doomed to fail. But it does mean that it was bound to be caught up in controversy and heated debate.”

This is what Roosevelt understood so well. If the government is going to provide a benefit, it had better provide it for everyone. Otherwise the knives and pitchforks will come out.

Eli