“In time, high taxes, large subsidies, and extensive mandatory contractual terms in tandem could well drive most private plans out of business… Where and when the tipping point comes, no one can say in advance, and perhaps some tenacious and well-run private plans may ultimately survive. But in the end, our gloomy prediction is that in the absence of a major change in course, a regulatory cascade will first force some plans to fail, after which other private plans will topple like tenpins.”

“The Constitution is an ‘evolving’ document, we’re told by those on the left, conforming to ‘standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.’ But who gets to decide which direction the evolution goes? Who is the arbiter of enlightenment, the adjudicator of decent standards, the fount of all human wisdom? Give yourself a gold star if you answered ‘a Supreme Court Justice.’ Because surely Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer know more about standards of decency than — well, than whom exactly?”

“It’s hard to sustain the level of indignant shock that the law rightly calls for. In just the past few weeks—looking over a couple of the statute’s provisions in relation to various writing projects on the HHS mandate and on Medicare—I have found myself shocked anew at the breadth and depth of Obamacare’s recklessness and folly, not because I didn’t know what it said before but because the passage of time inevitably dissipates the intensity of astonishment. It sometimes takes a renewed exposure to the thing itself, to the fact that it is really there in the U.S. Code, to be knocked back into the proper frame of mind.”