The Fiscal Times:  Obama’s Health Care Win Could Lose Him the Election, by Bruce Bartlett:

Now that a divided Supreme Court has ruled that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, it appears that it will be implemented on schedule. The cost, however, has been considerable—politically, constitutionally, and economically. …

We now know two things about Barack Obama’s economic policy his first year in office. First, the economy was in far worse shape than the administration’s public economic forecast projected. … By turning his attention away from the economy and pivoting toward health, Obama did two things. First, he gave the impression, valid or not, that he was not very focused on the economy. Second, he lost the opportunity to enact additional stimulus. …

Having committed himself to health reform, I think Obama made another error. During the 2008 campaign he said repeatedly that the nation’s biggest health problem was cost. … But rather than concentrate on cost control, where Obama might have found Republican support, he instead proposed a program that would expand health insurance for the uninsured. Cost control took a back seat. …

If Obama needed some other issue to focus on in his first term, tax reform would have made much more sense. In the process, health could easily have been dealt with. Almost all economists believe that the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance is a key source of excessive health care costs. Unfortunately, the exclusion was completely ignored during the health reform debate….

Time will tell whether greatly expanding health coverage to the uninsured was worth it. But at the moment, I am very doubtful that is the case.