“Hell no, we won’t go?”

So how’s Obamacare doing these days? I don’t hear much about it since the furor over that dumb website died down.

Not so hot, it seems. And certainly not because of those nefarious republicans.

As February draws near, things don’t look much better. Far fewer than half the number needed by March 31 have signed up. And, as it turns out, most of the people signing up for Obamacare aren’t the uninsured for whom it was supposedly enacted, but people who were previously insured (many of whom lost their previous insurance because of Obamacare’s new requirements).
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If the program fails, it won’t be because Republicans stopped it, despite all the House votes and defunding efforts. It will be because millions of Americans’ passive resistance brought it to its knees. Irish Democracy, indeed.

And that’s in USA Today, which isn’t exactly The Daily Anarchist.

Not even Bloomberg can get excited about the Lightbringer’s wet dream these days.

…various sources suggest that the number of previously uninsured people who have so far bought policies on the exchanges is somewhere south of 750,000.

To put that number in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the exchanges would sign up 7 million people in the first year, roughly 2 million of them transitioning from other insurance plans and 5 million of them previously uninsured. If the Journal’s numbers are right, then by the end of December, the exchanges had signed up at least 1.45 million previously insured folks out of the 2 million who were projected to enroll by the end of May — roughly 75 percent of the projected total. But at most, they’ve signed up 15 percent of the uninsured that they were expecting to enroll. You’d expect the early numbers to be somewhat weighted toward the previously insured, who probably want to maintain continuous coverage. Still, this is a fairly wild skew, and it leaves us with a burning question: Where are the uninsured?

Meanwhile our saviors the republicans are taking a slightly different approach. It seems they’ve decided that Obamacare was a good idea after all, just badly executed. They’re convinced they can screw up the American health care system at least as well as democrats can.

Top Republicans are saying they can no longer just be the party of “No” on Obamacare: They need to come up with an alternative healthcare policy.

Because saying no to a very bad thing, and then standing up and saying it louder, apparently just isn’t the republican way. Which is why we should all vote for them instead of democrats. Or something.

Except, saying no does actually seem to be working. The feds can destroy the insurance industry with the stroke of a pen, and pretty much have. But they can only replace it with their own horrible bureaucracy if enough people agree to play along.

Personally, my favorite phrase in the search for fallback positions is “irreverent veterinarian.” But that’s just me.