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Bookmark this page, so that in 2015 we'll see how I do as a prognosticator. Assuming that the Republicans don't undo this bill:

• In 2015, there will still be 50,000 people dying a year because they don't have access to the medical system.


• If you have insurance by then, and don't get it through one of the few organizations that still have enough financial clout to make insurance companies behave, your insurance will not pay for what you need.


• We'll be paying even more than we are now relative to the rest of the world for health care.

If the Republicans undo the health care bill, then that just means that we can't blame the health care bill for those same things being true.

Of course, as I just mentioned there are plenty of progressive bloggers and organizations congratulating themselves for passing this insane, unworkable, and regressive piece of crap. So, I'll make another prediction for this November:

• When the Democrats lose the House, they'll blame all those ungrateful people who "let the perfect be the enemy of the good" for their downfall, rather than their own uselessness and inattention to the fact that they did exactly the opposite of what any sane politicians would have done.

And don't I look forward to those insane shitheads lecturing me. To them, I repeat, I saw this coming, long before you even figured out what you were willing to jettison so you could say that Congress finally did something.

Furthermore, to make that prediction I employed the same principles of human behavior that I used to decide that this health care bill won't work. In both cases, the principle is the same: Those who don't have the power to make people do things will be depending on the humanity of the people who do to get what they need out of the system. In many cases, the people who have such power have it because they don't have that much humanity.

Someone whom I've regrettably lost touch with over the years used to say that his attitude about warnings was "When I tell you not to touch the stove, don't expect me to be sympathetic when you get burned." That's my attitude now. There's a price for stupidity, and the price for your stupidity is going to fall on all of us.

So, if you feel inclined to lecture me about how much worse things will be under Republican rule next year, I ask you to explain what you saw coming, and why that wouldn't have happened if this crew of Democrats hadn't been in charge.

You'd better have a bookmark handy.

UPDATE: In response to this article by David Dayen on the Republicans' rhetoric about repealing this bill, I'll make these predictions. If the Republicans get the power to repeal this bill:

• They'll repeal the Medicaid expansion


• They won't eliminate the insurance subsidies


• They won't eliminate the individual mandate

They won't cross the insurance industry, either. If you think that, you're even more delusional than the people I was writing about in the original part of this article.

The truly depressing thing about our current situation is that there is no party we can turn to to fix things.