Paul Krugman and "Stealth Single Payer"

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a new survey (pdf) on Obamacare in California, and it’s full of remarkably good news. For those who haven’t been following this, CA — with its now-dominant Democratic Party — is where Obamacare was implemented the way it was supposed to be implemented: the website worked pretty well from the beginning, Medicaid expansion was implemented, and the state worked hard on outreach. It was also a place that really needed reform: the uninsured were a high percentage of the population, and an individual market without community rating meant that the mere hint of a preexisting condition was enough to prevent coverage.

But it turns out that many of the newly insured are in fact being covered under a single-payer system — Medicaid. And as I’ve pointed out before,

Medicaid is actually the piece of the US system that looks most like European health systems, which cost far less than ours while delivering comparable results.

All in all, liberals really should be celebrating. California shows how Obamacare can and should work, and it’s looking pretty good.

Full article here.