text: It has been a pretty lousy month for the idea that the American government is capable of expanding access to healthcare to the uninsured and underinsured. The polls — or a poll, at least — are in, and people don’t like President Obama anymore. 
   
   Nearly all the news Americans have seen regarding the rollout of the exchanges — the things that people are referring to when they say “Obamacare” — has been relentlessly negative. The site doesn’t work. The president told everyone that they’d get to keep their existing plans, now it turns out that many, many people can’t. Some people now have to pay way more than they used to. Rates could skyrocket for everyone if enough people can’t or don’t want to sign up. This is what everyone — including people who only barely pay attention to the news, which is many millions of Americans — has been hearing, over and over again, for a full month now. That’s bad news for the success of the law, and it’s also bad news for the liberal experiment. 
   
   First of all, yes, Brian Beutler is totally correct, the people using these stories for political gain are over-hyping the problem, disingenuous and wholly uninterested in the principle of universal healthcare. That’s a given. In most instances, the policies being canceled are terrible fake policies that don’t cover anything. Generally, the policies now available to these people will offer superior coverage. Many of the people whose policies were canceled will qualify for subsidies to buy better coverage. It’s also quite possible — maybe probable — that insurance companies are intentionally trying to up-sell people on plans that will cost more out of pocket than other plans available on the exchanges. We know all this, because we read all the smart liberal bloggers. Most Americans don’t! For most Americans, Obamacare is, so far, canceled plans and a nonworking website. 
   
   This biggest problem is that the website just isn’t functional, but let’s take the administration at its word when it says that will be fixed in November. That’s not going to be close to the end of it. Which is why Republicans spent more time hammering Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about Obama’s “you get to keep your plan” line than the site troubles: They know it’s going to be a longer-lasting and more damaging story. Even if the website is fixed in a few weeks, these stories will continue to dominate the news for months. 
   
   And not just the news outlets that political elites pay attention to. People with canceled plan letters and “rate shock” horror stories will be featured on local news broadcasts across the country, with even less context and explanation that you’ll find on the national news, because local TV news is pretty uniformly terrible. And they’ll keep getting featured, because there are simply going to be a ton of people who get their policies canceled and then get asked to pay more. Sarah Kliff estimates 7-12 million people. That’s a fraction of the total population, and many of these people may now qualify for Medicaid or subsidies, but that’s still a lot of people deeply frustrated by “Obamacare” right as it begins its much-publicized rollout. 
   
   All of that is exactly why this is a dumb way to give people health insurance. This is a program that, by design, is going to annoy literally millions of Americans immediately. It will improve most of those people’s lives, but it will do so in a way that feels as coercive as possible. It didn’t have to be that way! No one is ever annoyed that they qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. People may hate paying the taxes that fund those programs, but people always appreciate direct benefits. 
   
   The way the ACA deals with people who had previously purchased crappy insurance on the individual market — and the way insurance companies have chosen to deal with these people — illustrates nearly every problem with attempting to design conservative, “market-based” ways to do things best done by straightforward government programs. It exposes the flaws in both the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party — a too-clever solution to a very simple problem — and the centrist third-way wing — making legislation intentionally worse to shield Democrats from increasingly ineffective accusations of liberalism, or to pick up Republican support that, in this environment, is never coming. So we end up with a program that hides many of its best and most important features, and loudly advertises its most coercive element. 
   
   Democrats created this mess for themselves. Conservative Democrats are responsible for many of the program’s flaws, and, perversely, their attempts to shield themselves from public outrage ended up creating a law that will lead to more public outrage than a more government-oriented program would’ve. But the program was designed by moderate and even liberal Democrats. They were working to appease the conservatives, yes, but we should have long since learned that a conservative congressional Democrat will only ever agree to something if you promise to make it a little bit, or a lot, worse. In other words, the ask should’ve been bigger. ||||| Henry Waxman made a plea at the end of Wednesday’s House hearing grilling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The California Democrat and liberal lion asked Republicans to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare. 
   
   Yes, Henry Waxman, who has made a career of ideological witch hunts and smash-mouth partisanship, wants a cease-fire over Obamacare, or so he says. 
   
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   reset Sebelius apologizes for glitches Obama blasts ACA critics 
   
   Waxman was picking up a common liberal theme: It’s not fair that Republicans continue to oppose the president’s eponymous health care law and pick at its failures, deceits and irrationalities. If only they were more reasonable, Obamacare could be tightened up around the edges with a few technocratic fixes and go on to its glorious destiny. 
   
   (POLITICO's guide to Obamacare) 
   
   It’s a little late to get or expect any Republican buy-in, though. That would have required serious compromise back in 2009, when Democrats, at the high tide of their power in the Obama era, saw no reason to make any. They ignored the polls, they ignored Scott Brown’s shocking win in Massachusetts, and they ignored normal parliamentary practices to pass the single most partisan piece of major social legislation in a century. 
   
   They insisted on this particular law, at this particular time. They own it. They own every canceled policy, every rate increase, every unintended consequence and every unpopular intended consequence. It is theirs, lock, stock and two smoking barrels. 
   
   But they can’t stop whining. 
   
   They complain that Republicans aren’t as cooperative as they were when the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan had a rocky start. This is absurd. The Part D website experienced what could be accurately described as “glitches,” rather than the full meltdown of HealthCare.gov. And Democrats supported the basic idea of the prescription drug benefit, even if they wanted a more generous one. 
   
   They complain that what they really wanted was single-payer, but had to settle for the unsatisfying second-best of Obamacare. Paul Krugman calls the health care law “a clumsy, ugly structure that more or less deals with a problem, but in an inefficient way.” (And he’s a supporter!) The reason they couldn’t get single-payer, though, is that there weren’t enough Democratic votes for it. 
   
   (PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes) 
   
   They complain that Republicans are refusing, in the words of Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, “to have an actual debate about the law’s trade-offs.” This is especially rich given that the president has steadfastly refused to acknowledge some of the most significant trade-offs, namely that some people will lose their current insurance and have to pay more in the exchanges. 
   
   Some liberal pundits have tiptoed around Obama’s flat assurance about keeping your insurance if you like it. Sargent politely says it was “narrowly untrue,” while Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic diplomatically says the president shouldn’t have spoken “in such clear-cut terms” and Jonathan Chait subtly says it “currently feels like a lie.” 
   
   Other commentators like Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune and Bill Maher of HBO frankly say the president lied. 
   
   It is a falsity the White House doesn’t want to give up. In a tweet heard around the world, White House aide Valerie Jarrett said it is a FACT that “nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans.” Never mind that the entire architecture of the law is based on forcing people in the individual insurance market out of their current plans and onto the exchanges; that is how it’s supposed to work and how it needs to work. 
   
   (WATCH: 7 quotes on Obamacare glitches) 
   
   In a characteristically graceless note, in his health care speech in Boston Wednesday President Obama didn’t say anything about how his prior declarations had been misleading, at best. Instead, he tweaked his dishonesty for a different positive spin: “For the fewer than 5 percent of Americans who buy insurance on your own, you will be getting a better deal.” Not if they are forced — as many of them will be — to buy benefits they don’t need at a price they don’t want to pay. 
   
   From the beginning, Obamacare has depended on a political ethic of doing and saying whatever is necessary. The falsehood about people keeping their coverage was essential to selling the legislation. So the president repeated it relentlessly. Now that actually allowing people keep their current coverage would undermine a pillar of the law, the president will resist all efforts to make good on his famous promise. Whatever it takes. 
   
   Near the end of his Boston remarks, the president said, “Both parties working together to get the job done, that’s what we need in Washington right now … You know, if Republicans in Congress were as eager to help Americans get covered as some Republican governors have shown themselves to be, we’d make a lot of progress.” 
   
   Is that how we’d make a lot of progress? The president got his law and it’s possible more people will be uninsured in 2014 than if it had never passed. That’s on him, no matter how much he and his supporters want to evade responsibility for their own achievement. 
   
   Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.
target: – The problems with the Affordable Care Act have at least accomplished this much for candidates on the left: They now should know what job No. 1 is going forward, writes Alex Pareene at Salon. "The immediate priority—and progressives running for office in 2014 and 2016 should practice saying this out loud—is fixing Obamacare." He's talking about more than tech trouble, however. They need to address what he sees as other fundamental flaws with the ACA, including "coverage gaps, the ways insurance companies will continue to exploit people and rip them off, and the potential for the cost burden on middle-class people to grow." It's important that liberals acknowledge the problems and propose tangible solutions—like, say, federalizing Medicaid for those who live in states that haven't embraced ObamaCare—rather than simply getting defensive about it, he writes. Along those lines, conservative Rich Lowry writes in Politico that he's already tired of the "whining" he's hearing from Democrats about the new law and why things aren't working. "They insisted on this particular law, at this particular time. They own it. They own every canceled policy, every rate increase, every unintended consequence and every unpopular intended consequence. It is theirs, lock, stock and two smoking barrels." Click for Lowry's full column. Or click for Pareene's full column.