Ezea Klein on Obamacare

Ezra Klein comments on Obamacare Derangement Syndrome on Vox.

Today, the right struggles with Obamacare Derangement Syndrome: the acute inability to see Obamacare as anything but a catastrophic failure that the American people will soon reject. For those suffering from ODS, all bad Obamacare news is good news, and all good Obamacare news is spin. In this world, delays of minor provisions in the law prove that the entire structure is collapsing, while surges of millions of people enrolling in insurance don't prove anything at all.

ODS has kept Republicans from updating their mental model of how Obamacare is doing. To them, the law's disastrous rollout proved that it was doomed. The fact that it recovered beyond anyone's expectations — literally, not a single analyst or policymaker I spoke to in December thought it credible that the exchanges would sign up 7 million by April, much less 7.5 million — hasn't made much of an impression.

There are still many good critiques to make of Obamacare. But Republicans don't want to critique Obamacare. They want to stop it. Repeal it. They want to make it the hill big-government liberalism dies upon. And those in the party who know better continue to be cowed by those in the party who don't. So long as Ted Cruz is going to New Hampshire promising that Obamacare can be stopped, no Republican can step before the faithful and outline a plan for how it can be tweaked.

The irony of this is that Obamacare's successes are, in many cases, conservatism's successes. The individual mandate is a conservative idea — and it's working. Liberals were skeptical that private insurers would compete on price even absent a public option — but they are. High-deductible health plans are a longtime conservative solution for health costs — and Obamacare is spreading them far and wide. But conservatives can't take credit for any of this, much less build on it.