Spending trillions and upset the constitutional order to please 17 percent of the people
In response to Contrary to Harry Reid, 29 Percent of Americans See Negative Impact from Obamacare:
Call me demanding, but I can't help thinking a plan that spends trillions of dollars, and upsets the American constitutional order, to make 17 percent of the public happy should be judged a hideous failure. For considerably less money, we could have bought everyone who didn't have insurance in 2008 a policy. And probably a car.
As I mentioned earlier, the hard truth shifting beneath all of these polls is that there never were all that many "hardcore" uninsured Americans. The most thorough analyses I recall from the days of ObamaCare's unlovely passage pegged the number at less than 8 million, which seems fairly consistent with the results of these polls, and especially with the number of previously uninsured people who are signing up for ObamaCare.
On that score, the Administration is of course concealing most of the vital data, but if we're still hovering around 3 million paid and valid policies, and (by some accounts) 70 or 80 percent of them are "churn" from Big Lie victims replacing their old plans with ACA policies... well, that's just not a lot of people "rescued" from the primary problem ObamaCare was supposed to solve. Another big problem was the use of emergency rooms as clinics, dumping a "cost shifting" burden on the people who have insurance - a problem that also turned out to be nowhere near as large as we were led to believe, and hasn't gotten much better due to ObamaCare. In fact, some say it's getting worse.
No sane person can possibly believe the expense and heartache of ObamaCare were worth the benefits to society. Obviously the people getting screwed by 80% premium increases, 100% deductible surges, and lost access to their favorite doctors are very angry, and the very small group of people who see concrete benefits due to the ACA are happy. But judged in total, there is no logical case to be made that all of this was worth it, or that nearly any of it was presented to the American people honestly.