I was just thinking yesterday, “I wonder what a guy who supports CastroCare thinks we should do to fix ObamaCare?” If you can’t guess, read this. If you can, why bother? His big knock on O-Care is true enough — “affordable” care ain’t so affordable — but you already knew that, just like you already know what he thinks should be done about it. The solution to gross mismanagement of the federal exchange, capricious deadline-shifting driven by political whim, and tens of trillions in unfunded Medicare liabilities is, obviously, a bigger role for government in health care. There’s no problem with liberalism that socialism can’t solve.
The piece itself is less interesting than the timing of it, appearing in the Times on day one for ObamaCare coverage. Moore’s not waiting around to see how the law works before pronouncing it sucky and calling for a public option and single-payer. He’s as eager for his own reasons to see it fail as righties are; the key question is how many leftists are with him. Go back and look at this Gallup poll from last month showing a 12-point spike between October and December in the number of Democrats who want to “expand” what the law does. My hunch is that that number’s ticked down now that the website’s kinda sorta working and two million people have kinda sorta enrolled, but I’d like to see it tracked monthly. Progressives will be torn this year between toeing the party line on how awesome O-Care is to improve their chances in the midterms and dismissing O-Care as a giveaway to corporate interests in the name of galvanizing a challenge to Hillary from the left. (In his piece, Moore takes care to applaud potential Clinton opponent Brian Schweitzer for opening a few state-funded clinics for state workers as governor of Montana.) You’ll see them oscillate between Moore’s position and OFA’s until November, I suspect, when they’ll finally start trending more durably towards the former ahead of 2016.
Exit question: How could anyone dislike ObamaCare? This vid makes it sound fantastic.
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