Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Yarglebargle Socialism!

As I've said many times, ACA is an improvement. It's also a very imperfect improvement. One thing The Left warned about years ago, aside from this weird fetish for some sort of single payer program (crazy left!), was that the most prominent elements of Obamacare - the exchanges - were likely to make people miserable because they enshrined the worst aspects of our insurance system and forced too many people to buy crappy insurance they couldn't afford. And, you know, probably most of those people should (given the choices) have bought crappy insurance that they couldn't afford. But all the wonksplaining in the world isn't going to change the fact that it's crappy insurance that people can't afford. In other words, the politics was never about convincing elite critics that it was a better deal, it was about convincing the people who had nowhere else to go other than the exchanges that it was a better deal. For them. Personally. Not because it changes the first derivative of the aggregate cost function over time.

None of this is a nonstupid reason to vote for Trump, of course, but you can't make people eat shit and then tell them they should love it, especially when it's the kind of shit people experience when they're least able to cope (when they're sick).