Evening Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Obama Declares Obamacare Victory

Jonathan Chait: Obama Declares Obamacare Victory: “The fate of the Affordable Care Act has followed a pattern that…

…I’ve argued, tracks the great polling debate of 2012, the main difference being the lack of a single clarifying event, akin to the election, to instantaneously discredit one side…. Ross Douthat has a column today retrenching the definition of failure. The most notable thing about it is the conservative ground he’s surrendered…. He hangs on the possibility of future failure–Congress may one day repeal the medical device tax or the Independent Payment Advisory Board’s recommendations, or scale back the Cadillac tax…. For all the Sturm und Drang, implementing a successful health-care reform was not actually very hard, for the simple reason that the United States started with the worst-designed health-care system in the industrialized world. When you spend far more on health care than any country, and you’re also the only advanced democracy that denies people access to medical care, it’s incredibly easy to design a better system…. The health-care system still has lots of problems, beginning with the 5 million poor Americans cruelly denied health care by red state Republicans…. If it’s so easy to massively improve health care, why didn’t it happen before? Because passing a health-care reform through Congress is incredibly hard…. The triumphs of Obamacare were designing a plan that could acceptably compensate the losers and generating the resources to cover the uninsured without alienating those with insurance. Designing and passing Obamacare was a project requiring real policy and political genius. Implementing it was easy.