In the latest issue of Virtual Mentor, a journal of the American Medical Association, I try to capture the multiple absurdities that make up ObamaCare. An encapsulation:

During the initial debate over ObamaCare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D‑CA) famously said, “We have to pass [it] so you can find out what’s in it.” One irreverent heir to Hippocrates quipped, “That’s what I tell my patients when I ask them for a stool sample.” The similarities scarcely end there…


ObamaCare supporters are ignoring the federal government’s dire fiscal situation; ignoring the law’s impact on premiums, jobs, and access to health insurance; ignoring that a strikingly similar law has sent health care costs higher in Massachusetts; ignoring public opinion, which has been solidly against the law for more than 2 years; ignoring the law’s failures (when they’re not declaring them successes); and ignoring that the law was so incompetently drafted that it cannot be implemented without shredding the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the U.S. Constitution itself. Rather than confront their own errors of judgment, they self-soothe: The public just doesn’t understand the law. The more they learn about it, the more they’ll like it…


This denial takes its most sophisticated form in the periodic surveys that purport to show how those silly voters still don’t understand the law. (In the mind of the ObamaCare zombie, no one really understands the law until they support it.) A prominent health care journalist had just filed her umpteenth story on such surveys when I asked her, “At what point do you start to question whether ObamaCare supporters are just kidding themselves?”


Her response? “Soon…”

(For more proof that ObamaCare supporters can draw from an apparently bottomless well of denial, see this article by Politico.)