One of the things that worries me about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is that it depends on a large number of young, healthy people signing up on the exchanges. The idea is that their premiums will more than pay for the care that they use, and the excess will go to pay for the older people who consume more health care dollars. It’s a big Ponzi Scheme. I explained almost four years ago why I think it won’t work. If the young and healthy don’t sign up on the exchanges, or if people consume more health care resources than the planners projected, then the whole scheme falls apart.

There are plenty of other things wrong with the ACA as well. It’s just bad legislation that was pushed through Congress in a hurry and in a somewhat irregular fashion because Democrats knew that they couldn’t get it to pass the normal way and time was running out. The ACA is something like 1,000 pages of text, and it’s doubtful that any one person understands everything in it. It’s a certainty that none of our Representatives or Senators fully understood what they were agreeing to when they voted for the thing.

It’s no secret that many of those who pushed for the ACA are unhappy that they couldn’t push through a single payer system: fully government-paid health care. I’ve heard Democrats say, in private conversations, that when the insurance companies fail to live up to the provisions of the ACA, we can finally move to a single payer system. And I begin to wonder.

I’ve long held that bad government is the result of incompetence and unintended consequences; that nobody could purposely create the inefficient, ineffective, and idiotic government bureaucracies, programs, departments, rules, regulations, commissions, etc. that we see every day. But in my more cynical moments I wonder . . .

Was the ACA crafted to fail? Was the plan all along to create a system that can’t possibly work, knowing that when it does there will be so many people dependent on the health care subsidies that it will be politically impossible to cancel the law and the only way forward will be to go to a single payer system? Because I think that’s what will eventually happen. Perhaps even in my lifetime.

It’s a frightening thought: that inefficient and ineffective government is created on purpose, slowly becoming larger and more intrusive. Much like the metaphorical boiling frog, we wouldn’t stand for the government we have if it had been sprung on us all at once, but we accept (with protest) continually more expensive and intrusive government if our taxes increase and our liberties erode a little at a time.

The problem, though, is that the metaphorical frog eventually dies.