I’ll just say it: “ObamaCare will collapse” is wishful thinking

Here’s a comment I posted on instapundit.com earlier this morning:

It’s foolish to imagine that ObamaCare will just collapse under its own weight. Has Medicare collapsed? Has Medicaid? Or Food Stamps?

No — ObamaCare may be many things (a thicket of regulations, a fraud- and identity theft-prone computer system, a set of mandates) but fundamentally it’s an entitlement program. Once people have begun receiving subsidies, how is it any more likely that politicians will be able to cancel them than they can make even a small cut in food stamps?

And what would it mean for ObamaCare to “fail”? It’s not like a car that’ll just break down on the highway, or even a corporation that’ll bleed cash until it declares bankruptcy. It’s a government entity.

This wishful thinking has to be replaced by serious proposals (that Democrats would actually agree to) to fix the whole thing — and not even by some columnist but by actual politicians. Irritated as hell that none of the so-called party leaders are doing this.

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by people who seem to live in a fantasy world in which ObamaCare will disintegrate on its own, or a Calvinist world in which, should it continue on, then it was meant to be and we should all just accept it and move on. Or a world in which staying true to principles holds not just for moral issues like abortion but principles around how to structure health care — so that trying to get something done, even in this policy arena, that involves violating one’s “Sacred Principles” is out of the question. Or in which resentment over the whole thing has just meant they’d rather suffer a lousy system than act to improve it.