There’s a Big Difference Between Mostly Dead and All Dead

Robert Tracinski gloats:

There’s no drum roll for the unveiling of the #1 top story of 2013: the spectacular collapse of ObamaCare. It’s a story so big there’s no suspense about anything else coming close.

We had to wait three and a half years from the time it was passed for ObamaCare to fully go into effect, and now we know the purpose of that delay, don’t we? It wasn’t because they needed four years to implement it, because they put off many key decisions about ObamaCare until after last year’s election. No, they needed the delay so that we wouldn’t “find out what’s in it” until after the election. Because if any of this had happened before November 2012, do you think Barack Obama would be sitting in the Oval Office right now?

Finding out what’s in it, to use Nancy Pelosi’s infamous phrase, has been the big theme of this year.

Never was a disaster more predictable, or more widely predicted. Possibly my own greatest moment of vindication as a writer is the fact that I warned, in late 2009, that under ObamaCare “You Will Lose Your Private Health Insurance.” Lo and behold, four years later, we’re losing it. And we’re not happy about it. That’s the big story to look for in 2014, by the way. I’m already hearing stories about Democratic operative being approached in public and told off by angry strangers who are livid at losing their insurance.

and declares the PPACA a dead letter. According to Mr. Tracinski the PPACA:

is a failure so total, so comprehensive, and so multifaceted that it will be studied by schoolchildren 50 years from now when their teachers explain to them why the giant welfare and regulatory state built up in the second half of the 20th century collapsed in the first half of the 21st.

Just as I’ve been saying that proponents of the PPACA have been and continue to be declaring victory prematurely, I think that opponents of the law are declaring it dead prematurely. Indeed, despite my resolve not to make predictions here for the coming year, I’m pretty confident that on December 31, 2014 the PPACA will still be on the books. There’s a good reason for this. As Mr. Tracinski observes:

ObamaCare is not really a law. It is an open-ended grant of power and a set of vague guidelines and aspirations, with all of the details to be filled in by the executive branch.

but he’s saying that as though it were a bad thing. From the point of view of supporters of the PPACA it’s a good thing. The PPACA has no benchmarks, no clear goals, and no way to determine whether it’s failing or succeeding. Its supporters will continue to declare victory while its opponents declare it dead for the foreseeable future.

However, my best advice, like the title of this post, is from The Princess Bride: get used to disappointment.