I’m pretty sure this was the plan all along:

So there are penalties for not purchasing insurance. But there’s no serious enforcement mechanism allowing the IRS to make sure those penalties get paid?

Given the importance of the mandate to the health reform project, this doesn’t make much sense. The law was designed to expand the number of individuals with health insurance. But without the ability to enforce the individual mandate, any expansion will likely be significantly smaller than projected.

But remember, if you like your plan, you can keep it! Untilless your insurance company goes out of business…

[Update a few minutes later]

You mean they don’t have to cover pre-existing conditions? More thoughts here and here.

Gee, do you mean that when a multi-kilopage bill is rushed though without anyone actually reading it, there could be screwups? Who would have guessed? Certainly not some of the morons in my comments section, who think that passing bills without reading them is just dandy.

Every day, November is a day closer.

[Update a couple minutes later]

And speaking of November approaching, this isn’t good new for the Dems, though it’s great news for the Republic:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the health care overhaul signed into law last week costs too much and expands the government’s role in health care too far, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, underscoring an uphill selling job ahead for President Obama and congressional Democrats.

…Supporters “are not only going to have to focus on implementing this kind of major reform,” says Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard. “They’re going to have to spend substantial time convincing people of the concrete benefits of this legislation.”

This is hilarious. The president and the Democrats have spent the last fourteen months telling us how wonderful this plan is, to no avail. Now that it’s going to start to actually bite, they think that they’re going to be able to explain it better, and be more convincing? Especially when they don’t know what’s in it any more than they did before it passed?

And note, this is a Gallup poll, which means it’s “adults.” I haven’t checked Rasmussen yet, but I’m sure that the news for them from “likely voters” is even more grim. For them, that is, not for us.

…and you may not be able to keep your plan. But what would the head of Aetna know?

And I’m sure that this is completely unrelated:

Americans have a pragmatic sort of optimism in adversity, and after ObamaCare’s passage, I figured that would take the form of a “wait and see” attitude. Democrats made a lot of promises about this legislation, and there would be some impulse to wait to see how this bill fulfills or fails them.

Certainly, Democrats in office had hoped for that kind of response, but thus far, they’re not getting it. That may be due to some of the unpleasant details that the media have finally reported. Businesses are having to take big charges on lost tax credits, and promises over pre-existing condition treatment raised expectations to unrealistic heights. Instead of making lives easier, the bill has already made lives more complicated.

The real test will come in Rasmussen and other polling around September. If 54% of people still want it repealed — and that opposition has remained relatively unchanged for the last several months — then Democrats won’t have anywhere to hide.

Wind sowing now. Whirlwind reaping in November.

[Update a while later]

Congressional (dis)approval ratings have approached the levels last seen in late October, 1994. Remember what happened a few days later? And it’s only March…

…a health-care parable.

Here’s the latest, from AT&T. Bet this will encourage them to hire a lot more people:

AT&T Inc. said it plans to take a non-cash charge of about $1 billion in the first quarter following the passage of the health-care reform bill earlier this week, according to a filing submitted by the company Friday. The telecommunication giant will also evaluate changes to its health care benefits for employees and retirees.

But don’t forget — if you like your plan, you can keep it! As long as the ObamaCare hasn’t wiped it out, of course…

And of course, we can at least count on new jobs for IRS agents.

…you’ll love ObamaCare. Further thoughts here:

In both cases, despite broad public skepticism, the Democrats pushed forward on their bill while the White House intensified its messaging efforts, turning President Obama loose on crowd after friendly crowd in an effort to sell Middle America on a near-trillion-dollar fix whose murky specifics were in flux even as it approached a final vote. Sure enough, in both cases polling found support for the measure slowly creeping up as Congress passed the measure (with virtually no Republican support.) And in the days immediately after each became law, public support even reached scant majorities or pluralities in some places, with many saying that though the bill was imperfect, it sure beat doing nothing at all.

Liberals, covered in the stink of success, are now enjoying that bump. But, as I outline in the piece, if Obamacare’s post-passage public opinion trajectory is anything like that of the stimulus, they shouldn’t get too comfortable. A year out, the popularity of the stimulus falls somewhere between Tiger Woods and John Edwards. — and for similar reasons. The stimulus is widely-perceived to have been a failure because it didn’t keep its promise to stop and reverse job losses. Instead, 49 of 50 states have lost jobs since the stimulus passed.

We’re only a few days out from Obamacare’s passage and already reports are piling in from businesses bracing for tax increases and coverage changes. Wait until it’s been a year.

Maybe they should have read the bill…