Portside

Wednesday’s status report on the health-insurance reforms was by far the best news for Democrats and the Obama administration since the program’s incompetent launch. January was the first month when new enrollments surpassed expectations, as the balky HealthCare.gov Web site began functioning more or less as intended.

Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. Obama took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and improved some of its provisions. In deciding what course, the question for the new administration, which successfully ran a campaign with a large plank to make major changes to the health care delivery system, try to go around the existing insurance industry or through it?

The individual mandate was not necessary - the insurance companies like it because it does bring young, healthy people who aren't likely to get sick into the system.

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It’s not so much that Obama “sold us out” to a powerful constituency as that he picked the wrong powerful constituency. A quick look at the financial details reveals that health insurance nationalization was always the real “path of least resistance.”