An apt assessment by George Will from his new outpost on Fox News this evening, and a similar one to Krauthammer‘s last night; but the emergence of the new, obfuscatory defensive line that “insurers are responsible for canceling plans, not ObamaCare” — which evidently took less than 12 hours to become a bona fide progressive talking point — really helps to drive the point home. Trying to shift the blame onto insurers for the oh-so-heinous crimes of offering a wide variety of both comprehensive and non-comprehensive plans, and pricing them according to their actual associated costs and risks, in an individual market with a high rate of turnover is just another way for the Obama administration to yet again insist to both individuals and businesses they their arbitrary determinations of “fairness” are both wiser and nobler than anything that freely cooperative actors could ever come up with — which they they use their executive fiat to override and ignore. They certainly did a lovely job of selling the “Affordable” Care Act as a favor they were doing all Americans, the only problem being that it’s a favor many Americans are discovering they don’t actually want. Via NRO:

And as a result supporters of ObamaCare are pioneering new dimensions of sophistry. Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, today said the president should have caveated it. Now that’s a clunky verb. What he means is he should have put a big asterisk over his statement, and the asterisk would say, ‘You can keep your insurance if but only if you buy the insurance that we think you ought to have,’ which reveals the part of ObamaCare that is applied Bloombergism. The mayor of New York’s been a very candid progressive. He says, ‘I know what you ought to eat, I know what you ought to drink, and I’m going to use the police power of the city to make you do it.’ And ObamaCare says exactly the same thing: You’re free to choose if you choose the right thing.