Oh Doctor

It's a sign of what a debacle Obamacare has become that the President yesterday gave the public a one-year reprieve allowing them to keep their old health care plans.  I never thought he'd do it.  Up till now he's said no to the slightest demands, knowing the law must go forward if it's to have a chance.  To waver (or waiver) is practically total surrender.

Not that his rhetoric signaled he gave up.  He made some apologies in passing, but by and large put on a brave face, saying things are getting better and he will stop any action to bring down the Affordable Care Act. He said there's no way he'll let the GOP drag us back to the broken system we had (but instead we must march forward to a new broken system).  While he's given up trying to claim he didn't mislead when he said the public could keep their plans if they liked them (and if my computer were working better I'd link to contemporary posts noting this wasn't true--and I said so not because I was so smart, but because it was obvious), he's still willing to add insult to injury, explaining to the public that they're apparently too stupid to understand they'd be better off signing onto the government plan.

There must have been tremendous political pressure on the President.  Probably party leaders made it clear he'd better do this or, at the very least, he understood steps would be taken with or without him so he'd best get out in front.  No matter how it happened, alas, it's a pretty cynical move.

First, of course, it's just a one-year deal--in other words, an attempt to put off the problem until just after the 2014 elections.  So a year later the problem will be back as big as ever--and you can throw in the employer mandate as well.

Second just where did he get the power to do this?  The Affordable Care Act is quite a piece of legislation, that apparently is or isn't law based on the President's whim.

Third, he has to know this can't work.  The law has already been passed (as Democrats kept pointing out a few weeks ago during the shutdown) and the insurers have already taken it into account. They've canceled millions of policies and the market has changed. They can't just uncancel them now.  At the very least, that would take a tremendous amount of work (for which they will not receive extra money) and almost certainly higher premiums, not to mention some legally necessary help from state officials. So, in effect, this move doesn't fix the problem, but gives Democrats someone else to blame for it over the next year.

In addition, the one-year reprieve only makes adverse selection in the insurance exchange that much more certain, plunging the overall system--which already was in trouble--into bigger disaster.  The whole point of Obamacare is to force everyone into a government-approved plan, one way or another. If it can't do that, it has no need to exist.

Republicans--and perhaps some Democrats--may still try to pass legislation to deal with the situation, but if it's anything of substance, the President will presumably veto it and, in any case, short of repealing Obamacare, I don't see how they can easily rebuild what has by this point been torn asunder. (I wonder if the insurers would challenge a law that demands they undo what they just did--and I wonder how Chief Justice Roberts would write that opinion.)

The politics has a year to play out, but no matter the result, we've got a strange situation.  There's this massive law, partly enacted, that seems to be on a collision course with itself.  I'm not sure what happens next.  Can it die while it's still on the books?