Why Obamacare Can't Be What Its Supporters Want

James Surowiecki of the New Yorker and I seem to have come to roughly the same conclusion about the Obamacare exchanges, which is that they’re in big trouble. Our diagnosis of the source of this problem is basically the same. As Surowiecki puts it, “Obamacare is being hobbled by the political compromises made to get it passed.”

Yet we differ as to the proper treatment; I think that when it became clear how crippled the bill was going to be, the administration and its backers in Congress should have retreated to a more modest goal. Surowiecki, on the other hand, argues, “In fact, government hasn’t mucked around enough: if we want to make universal health insurance a reality, the government needs to do more, not less.”