Yuval Levin‘s latest National Review article highlights ObamaCare advocates’ changing tactics in defending the unpopular legislation. He notes that the most recent arguments in favor of the health care law tend to focus on particular elements, rather than the entire monstrosity.
What stands out about them is their focus on small pieces of the massive law to the exclusion of the whole. This kind of argument-from-the-parts contends that Obamacare is just a series of discrete and modest tweaks of our health-care system, rather than a wholesale transformation, and so any problems with it should be fixed by small changes rather than by repeal. But Obamacare is precisely a wholesale transformation — a massively ambitious, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended over time to vastly increase the scope of government control over the health sector.
It is not hard to see why defenders of Obamacare no longer want to defend it as a whole. The whole is an incoherent mess and portends disaster for American health care. But opponents of the law should not cede the terms of debate. Many parts of Obamacare are unpopular (the individual mandate to buy coverage, the board of experts that will cut Medicare payments for various treatments, the onerous new burdens on businesses), but it is the structure of the whole that threatens the future of American health care, and it is therefore the whole that must be repealed.
