Barack Obama

I don't really agree with the strategy of laying low for 2 years until right before the exchanges open up, but maybe that is the best strategy.

But there is a huge exposure here. We have a majorly f%%%ed up health care system and the ACA mainly addresses insurance coverage for people who didn't really have a big problem --they just went to the ER and didn't pay the bills. It is a good thing to clean up that aspect of our HC system, but that doesn't begin to touch the things that are really killing people. I buried my mother today (well, to be accurate, put her in a mausoleum). She was the victim of the "specialty stovepiping" that has overtaken our system in the past 20 years. The real money is in specialties, so the PC docs respond by taking on 4000 patients and basically give flu shots. Nobody looks over the whole patient, and I don't see anything in ACA that even tries to address that.

And here's the problem. Come January 1, maybe there will be fewer ripoffs by insurance companies, but people will still be killed every day by this mess of a delivery system we have. And when they do, lots of people will point the finger and say "See I told you Obamacare was a terrible idea."

There really is no way to win at this thing. But it is still worth waging this campaign. We'll just have to be prepared to fight all those anecdotes as they come up.

OTOH, the GOP has been so hyperbolic in predicting the end of the universe because of Obamacare that we do have an opportunity to turn the tables on them. "Why should anybody vote for a person who was so very wrong about Obamacare?"