Krugman Admits: 'Obamacare Ended Up Being a Big Kludge'

After months of boldly promising that Obamacare would be a smashing success, New York Times progressive columnist Paul Krugman now concedes that President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhual is a “mess” and that “Obamacare ended up being a big kludge.” 

Krugman spent months blasting “the sheer meanspiritedness of Obamacare opponents” and issuing proud proclamations that “the real Obamacare shock will be one of unexpected success.” On the grand opening of the Obamacare exchanges, Krugman explained to readers that the cascade of website failures were actually “good news, not bad, for the program.” 

Now, however, Krugman says “the good news about HealthCare.gov, the portal to Obamacare’s health exchange, is that the administration is no longer minimizing its problems. That’s the first step toward fixing the mess.” 

Krugman contends that limited government ideology is to blame for Obamacare’s failures because it is “fundamentally hostile to the notion of the government helping people.” Furthermore, he posits that the government’s inability to run Obamacare only proves that the government should run all of healthcare in a so-called “single payer” government takeover. 

“Still, the fact remains that Obamacare is an immense kludge–a clumsy, ugly structure that more or less deals with a problem, but in an inefficient way,” writes Krugman.