If it’s really the case that liberals stand to win if the law goes down, then shouldn’t ObamaCare’s backers be hoping that the Supreme Court rules against the law? I suspect I don’t see them rooting for the law to be overturned for a reason.

Still, Winkler isn’t the only one making some version of this case. The Nation’s George Zornick declared last week that “if the mandate falls, single payer awaits.” Columnist Eugene Robinson similarly predicted that if the mandate falls, “a much more far-reaching overhaul of the health care system will be inevitable.” The “only alternative” Robinson sees to ObamaCare? A single-payer system.

If only there were alternatives to columnists (and presidents) who can’t believe that there are health policy alternatives to increasing the government’s control over the system. The United States has been steadily ratcheting up regulation of the health sector for nearly 50 years. At this point, the government is responsible for almost half of all health spending. Isn’t it at least possible that the problems with the health system are not caused by too little government interference but by too much? Liberal health wonks frequently insist that they mostly want to make the system smarter and more effective, but they and their predecessors have been saying the same thing about every reform for decades—and yet it always seems that yet another fix, another tweak, another technocratic reform is necessary to finally rationalize the system.