It's hard to say what's becoming of Dick Morris. Having predicted, last year, the disappearance of president Obama, he's now predicting that ObamaCare "is disappearing," 45 days before it even kicks in and a good four-and-a-half months before open enrollment closes. That in itself--Morris' pixilation--bewilders me not. Par for his course. Yet his grim delight over ObamaCare's premature demise is weirdly immersed in liberal justifications of ObamaCare's ultimate success.
What does that mean? For starters Morris performs a bit of his famous back-of-the-envelope computation and optimistically projects "a ridiculously low figure" of "fewer than 1.5 million enrollments nationally" throughout "the entire period" of enrollment. This, alone, is nothing but statistical gobbledygook, in that Morris fails to account for the rapid acceleration in sign-ups as we get nearer to thee, the end of ACA enrollment.
But that of course isn't the weirdly liberal part, which is this: Morris goes on to observe that "itβs hard to take seriously a program that has so limited an enrollment," whose comparative limitation he emphasizes in noting that "Medicaid [is] reaching more than 100 million with the new expansion"--which is a singular glory of ObamaCare, and, given political pressures, will in time become even more glorious.
Ah, but Dick's liberal heart was just warming up. ObamaCare's Independent Payment Advisory Board--you know, those "death panels"--is not "likely ever to meet," he prophesies. And you wanna know why? Because, write Morris, and I quote, the low rate of medical inflation is vitiating its purpose and "Health economists predict a continuing low rate of medical inflation." ObamaCare's ad agency thanks you, Dick.
As for the liberty-crushing Tyranny of health-insurance reform, Morris also has a splendid shout-out to Fox viewers and Limbaugh listeners and Beck mastubators. "The individual mandate has fines so token as to make a mockery of the idea that there even is a mandate," he preens--for propagandistic reasons so contradictory as to make a mockery of respectable propaganda.
Morris concludes--again, quite oddly--with a powerfully favorable assessment of ObamaCare's intent, which would be unachievable without ObamaCare's overall structure, whose successful erection Morris initially denied: "So all that will be left are some very good consumer protection insurance reforms requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions and a ban on cancellation or premium hikes in the event of illness."
Sign him up. Rarely have I read such a vigorous--albeit really weird--defense of the Affordable Care Act.