Everyone seems to be piling on the president about the lie that killed a million health plans. But I feel sorry for the president; really, he is a victim.

What would you expect from the son of a naïve young liberal co-ed who selected a father for her child that would be outta here in a couple of years? What would you expect from a man that was sent to a lifelong Communist for mentoring in his teens? What would you expect from a man that believed that any means to get to single-payer was justified? A man wafted aloft by liberals eager to do their bit to advance racial justice.

As liberals always tell us, we shouldn't blame the victim. We should recognize that, even with the best health policy experts in the world, crafting a complex subsidy scheme is a very difficult job. Just because FDR hornswoggled the nation into buying Social Security and LBJ sweet-talked us into Medicare and everyone lived happily ever after doesn't mean anything. Those guys were geniuses of a golden age. Ours is an age of mere mortals.

With Social Security the only immediate cost was a mere 2% tax on wages, one half to be deservedly paid by the notoriously exploitative employers of the time. Even then the economy tanked in the year that the tax started and voters gave 81 House seats to the Republicans in the 1938 mid-term elections.

Medicare whooshed to passage with bipartisan majorities in 1965, but in 1966 the voters gave 47 seats to the Republicans in the midterms.

Average, ordinary Americans could see that they would benefit from Social Security and Medicare, even if they had to pay a little in taxes to get there. And they were comforted to know that their contributions were all locked up in a Trust Fund.

ObamaCare is different. Ordinary middle-class Americans already have health insurance. That's why the president had to lie to them.

But what about the famous 30 or 45 million without health insurance?

Please hold onto something solid, because you are about to read heresy.

The 45 million don't want health insurance; at least not any kind of health insurance they have to pay for. And in this they are completely sensible and practical. The facts of their lives and the stories they hear from their friends tell them that if they need emergency health care they can get it.

Here is the awful truth about ObamaCare that we have barely begun to grasp. Nobody is going to be a winner, not even the formerly uninsured.

If you get your ObamaCare Bronze Plan on the exchange you may qualify for a subsidy. Let us suppose that you qualify for a subsidy that pays your entire premium. Wonderful. But here's the kicker. Your Bronze Plan will come with a hefty deductible, just as it would if the evil Republicans had designed ObamaCare. So you are going to be out of pocket if you need health care. Just like before.

But it turns out there's a way to win if you are young and healthy and employed and like your health plan. It's the story of a young man in Colorado. His health plan got canceled and his premium's going to triple. But since he earns $21,000 a year, he's eligible for Medicaid. So there's one young middle-class invincible that won't be contributing to the fund to pay for those subsidized formerly uninsured.

Remember how ObamaCare was going to pay for itself by forcing the young invincibles to subsidize the old and the sick? How's your ObamaCare math today, Barry?

Social Security and Medicare were political masterstrokes that gave all Americans the warm feeling that all their retirement worries were behind them. ObamaCare is different. ObamaCare is a political sinkhole that will make every American, even the formerly uninsured, worse off than before.

It's not just that you won't be able to keep your plan, or your doctor. It's not just that you'll pay more for less health care. The very people that the whole earthquake is supposed to help will consider themselves worse off.
And President Obama has his name on it.

The problem with the welfare state is that it is Springtime for Freeloaders. It transforms freeloaders from antisocial monsters into lovable helpless victims on a national reality show. Politics is reduced into a fraud to trick half the people into paying for all the freeloading for the other half. Until there is no more money.

Here's why I feel sorry for President Obama. In a racist, sexist, homophobic society like ours, it's stands to reason that tea-party extremists would conspire to make an African American get stuck holding the baby -- when the government runs out of money for the lovable troupe of freeloaders.

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism. Get his Road to the Middle Class.