In November, Krauthammer wrote that Obamacare was a symbol of Obama’s “new, more ambitious, social-democratic brand of American liberalism” and that its failure “would catastrophically undermine their ideology of ever-expansive central government providing cradle-to-grave care for an ever-grateful citizenry.”

Now, Krauthammer says the question is different. It’s about how real the numbers are, he says, after accounting for people who won’t pay their premiums and people who are just replacing old insurance with new insurance…

In October, Yuval Levin sounded this warning in National Review: “The technical failures of the exchange websites raise grave alarms about the technocratic vision at the core of Obamacare. That technocratic vision begins from the notion that we already possess the knowledge it takes to run an efficient health-financing system and all that remains is to apply that knowledge from the center, with the government defining the insurance product strictly and then compelling insurers to sell it, compelling consumers to buy it, managing the countless assorted variables and pressures involved, and calling what results a market.”

On Tuesday, Levin said the important question is not the website, but whether it “makes sense to centralize the economics of health care in this way” — so the new enrollment numbers are “not the answer to that question.”