In football, the team having the ball typically has thirty seconds to move it for a play. If it fails to move the ball in that time, it suffers a penalty for delay of game. Public policy should have such a rule. Then Barack Obama would suffer many penalties for delay of game. He has delayed his great game, Obamacare, too often to count. And overnight he delayed it again.

Latest Obamacare delay

About five and a half million people have lost their health insurance to the Obamacare minimum coverage mandate. This although Barack Obama said,

If you like your plan, you will keep your plan.

The web site Healthcare.gov has not worked well since its launch. Even when it has worked at all, most security experts find it too dangerous to use. Result: too few people have enrolled in Obamacare to make it actuarially sound.

So now Obama said those who lost their health insurance need not enroll. In fact they can buy “catastrophic insurance.” How odd: Obama once said that kind of insurance was sub-standard.

The Obama administration guesses that half a million people who lost their insurance, still don’t have it. And that’s likely a “conservative” estimate (pardon the irony). If only half a million people left the great Obamacare risk pool, that pool still might work. So the Obama administration hopes. But the numbers might be far higher.

And that would destroy the insurance market.

Ultimate irony

A little boy tells his father that his civics test was very easy. By Cartoosh. Released under CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported License.

Ironically, the Obama administration embarrasses itself with this change. It says it has made a hardship for people, a hardship that exempts them from its own law.

A further irony: this could have been what Obama wanted. Destroy the insurance market, and people would clamor for single-payer “insurance.”

That clamor is not happening.

Instead the people, and their representatives, are rounding on the de facto President for his carelessness. And the failures of the program will happen again and again.

More broadly, Americans are now turning away from big government. The likely reason: big government will not deliver the goods. Not even for Barack Obama’s regular constituents. The ivory-tower professors still see big government as an ideal. But ordinary Americans, today more than ever, see big government as a threat. Which it is. A threat to liberty, and now even to the good working of an economy.

Those who sold big government, could sell it so long as it was practical. When people see it as impractical, no one can make this sale.

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