The Obamacare Fiasco

Holman Jenkins on Obama's blowing of healthcare reform:

Here, Mr. Obama squanders the opportunity his presidency represented. For it's entirely possible to visualize incorporating this insight about the proper role of insurance with a system of guaranteed coverage and individual mandates à la ObamaCare, and indeed back when Mr. Obama was believed to be smart, we would have guessed this was the direction in which he would head.

Like any real reformer, he would have challenged both parties down to their ideological socks. Republicans would have had to swallow a universal mandate in return for an across-the-board tax cut to compensate workers for loss of the health insurance loophole.

Mr. Obama says he's content to be a single-term president. The soonest, then, we can hope for real progress on health care is three years.