New Coke Forever

It's only a matter of time now before we get "Classic Healthcare":

Debate over how to respond to Americans who are irate about losing their insurance is intensifying on Capitol Hill. The House plans to vote this week on a bill introduced by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) that would extend this year’s insurance plans for a year. On Tuesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she is co-sponsoring a bill with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would require insurers to offer 2013 plans on the individual market indefinitely.

As the article in the Washington Post points out, there's little chance that the online website for HealthCare.gov is likely to be working properly by the end of the month, which is the self-imposed deadline that the president set out for his troubled enterprise. The problem is that, as appealing as it would be to see a de facto repeal of Obamacare by stampeding red state Democrats, it won't work. If you allow people to keep their old insurance, the risk pools are going to be so skewed that the whole thing is going to collapse under its own weight. Now, it's possible that the collapse isn't a bug, but rather a feature.

One possible solution comes from a survivor of Kathleen Sebelius's reign in Kansas:

Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger said she and her counterparts in other states have offered suggestions to the White House on how best to address the problem of canceled policies. The most obvious solution, she said, would be to allow customers to renew policies early to let them stay in effect until November 2014. But that would come with a trade-off, she said: Those people would not receive federal subsidies for which they might be eligible if they bought a plan on the exchange.

Perhaps unwittingly, Praeger gives the game away. Among its many ambitions, Obamacare is at bottom a massive example of "spreading the wealth around," via subsidies. You might call it a Ponzi scheme, but that would be unfair to Ponzi. So what to do? Back to Praeger:

She said that she and other insurance commissioners are trying to address consumers’ desire to use the federal exchange. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s just a big mess right now. . . . I don’t know what to tell people.”

Other than, "I told you so?"