KRUGMAN: I’m liking Obama more and more as he slogs through his second term. (Me Too!)

[beerandjesus]

22. Well, there are limits to how much energy I can expend defending ACA...

Anecdotally, though, I can say this: I live in South Carolina, and my wife was the principal Obamacare navigator for our county. On the one hand, it was heart-breaking for her to meet person after person who, thanks to our right-wing governor, was actually too poor to qualify for ACA benefits (since S.C. declined Medicaid expansion, and subsidies only kick in *over* a certain threshold). On the other hand, it was very gratifying for her to sign up many people who had never had health care before, and literally hadn't seen a doctor in years. For me, that's a pretty good representation of Obama's "good" policies: Better than nothing, but not as good as they ought to be.

(And I'm deliberately not going into his bad policies--we agree on those anyway.)

You're certainly right about the corporate give-away aspect; and I think one of the most fucked-up things about our current right-wing consensus is the idea that somehow, any public policy is more virtuous if someone is skimming money off it. Hence we get ACA, KBR in Iraq, and all manner of "public-private partnerships", most of which Obama (wrongly) supports. But at the end of the day, if the ACA is alleviating some suffering for some people, I have to give it some credit.

In The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman basically advocates for the originally-proposed ACA, but emphasized strongly that the public option was a necessary component, for reasons I'm sure would be familiar to you. Since that book was 2007, I don't quite think you can say he supports Obamacare because it's Obama.