>>to give this entire mess a pass

The mess is what it is and history will take of deciding how bad it actually is.
It's hard for me to conceive how it will be given an A+ by history, but I missed the market surge of the past 4 years so my prognostication skills are suspect at best.

As I see it, the system will succeed if it validates its basic premise that by getting the bulk of the 41 million uninsured into some kind of plan costs to the rest of the already insured population - who are now paying for a lot of the costs of caring for the uninsured - will drop substantially and health care in general will have been improved.

It worked in Mass, but history will tell us how it pans out on a national scale.


That said, selecting this woman as an example of the failure of the system is a bit of a stretch, I think.
She's disappointed, yes, but no worse off than she was before.