If Obamacare's insurance reforms break the market, that calculus still won't change: Most people will still have insurance they like, and they will not be willing to give it up in order to solve problems in the individual market -- which now covers about 5 percent of the population and is expected to ultimately cover something over that. Even if the individual market functionally disappears, most people will still be covered, and most politicians will be unwilling to endorse a program that takes away what they have. There is no path to single payer from even a spectacular Obamacare implosion -- for the same reason that there was no path to single payer before Obamacare was passed.

Ironically, single payer seems much more plausible if the system succeeds. One possible path along which the health-care law could develop is that more and more employers dump folks onto the exchanges, breaking the link between employment and insurance for millions of Americans. If that happens but other problems remain -- such as rising premiums -- then you can imagine a series of reforms that ultimately leads to single payer, probably starting with a public option. Employers would probably still provide supplemental health insurance as a benefit, the way some do in the U.K., but it would be a relatively cheap add-on, not a huge portion of your compensation package.

So dash your hopes and allay your fears. An Obamacare failure would be bad in many ways, and it would mean significant changes for the insurance market. But we're not getting the National Health Service anytime soon.

The Pinto was 40 years ago. You conveniently overlooked the money they spent correcting that problem, and the fact that the Pinto has been out of production for a long time. That error didn't last the full run of the Pinto, for that matter.

But no, let's go ahead and line up to bash the American company. Need I remind you what the Japanese cars were like in the 1970s? Toyotas were barely able to reach freeway speed. Hondas were too small for a large segment of Americans (ie, people more than 6' tall) to drive comfortably. Both had rust problems galore. But yet they improved. Now people speak fondly of their Japanese cars. In the 1970s nobody would have believed that Toyota and Honda could some day make competitive luxury cars, yet now we have Lexus and Acura.

And if we look to South Korea, the turn around is even more dramatic (at least with regards to how quickly it happened). Hyundai from the 80s and 90s were utter garbage. They probably never should have been allowed on American freeways but we let them on anyways. They weren't reliable, comfortable, or safe. Yet now Hyundai and Kia are very competent little cars.

But yet we keep bashing Ford for what happened 40 years ago. If we did that to the Japanese and Korean cars they would have gone bankrupt years ago.

In case you haven't noticed, Ford Fusion has beat Toyota Camry in initial quality, best midsize, and car of the year more than once and from multiple reviewers. But yet obviously it is more important to remind people about what Ford did when Nixon was president.

You cannot make a child through sodomy

Yeah, that's been debunked: http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/06/dont-blame-heritage-for-obamacare-mandate/ [heritage.org] But you keep playing that card as you whistle past the graveyard, girl. Obama's perfidy is too publicly on display. The Democrats own it.

we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage