On the Today Show this morning, Chuck Todd brought up the singular, ultimate fact about ObamaCare that certain Democrats at the moment seem determined to neglect in their desperation to look as though they are being proactive about making good on President Obama’s now most infamous bit of healthcare-related subterfuge, the “if you like it, you can keep it” promise with which they so blithely went right along: The fixes they’re proposing won’t accomplish much except to directly and more speedily undermine the premise of the entire overhaul.

LAUER: Chuck, can you tinker with a part of the program and not impact the viability of the entire program, numbers-wise?

TODD: I’ve talked to one of the architects of this plan… and he essentially argues, no. If you start messing around with this and trying to grandfather in some of these folks, you undermine the whole premise of the law. The whole way insurance companies can make it affordable for somebody who has a preexisting condition is if they are forcing these younger and healthier people essentially to pay a little more. You know, that’s the way, and this is the problem that the president brought upon himself when they didn’t make this clear. There are always winners and losers in any legislation. There is a small number of losers here if you want to count losing as in, having to pay more for your health insurance. Healthy people are going to pay more. That was always the intention, that was the only way you could make the law work if you wanted to bring down the cost for sick people.

Hmm — we’ll overlook the “small number of losers here” for the moment and focus on the fact that, yes, the administration did do this to themselves by purposefully evading an honest representation about the law’s methods and consequences. They hardly managed to pass the thing as it is, and if Americans had been told they were going to be forcefully redirected to get the law to work, it likely would have done even worse. Funnily enough, they seem to be finding out anyway:

Americans’ views of the 2010 healthcare law have worsened in recent weeks, with 40% approving and 55% disapproving of it. For most of the past year, Americans have been divided on the law, usually tilting slightly toward disapproval. The now 15-percentage-point gap between disapproval and approval is the largest Gallup has measured in the past year.