Right now, that’s happening only to people — a relatively small segment of the population, but still big enough to number in the millions — who purchase insurance through the individual market. But if some in the vastly larger group who have coverage through their jobs also begin to lose coverage, many, many millions of Americans will get the message that Obamacare is not for them. It could happen; certainly the law contains incentives for employers to cancel coverage and send employees to the Obamacare exchanges.

If that happens, those people will find themselves victims of Obamacare’s higher purpose, which is the redistribution of wealth. Obamacare is “the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago,” wrote the New York Times’ David Leonhardt the day after the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010. “Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of [Obama’s] deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.”

If millions of middle-class Americans face steeply higher health coverage costs, they will realize they are doing their part to end the age of Reagan.