At his end-of-the-year news conference, President Barack Obama called the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act his single biggest mistake of 2013.
That's putting it mildly. Supporters of Obamacare couldn't wait to put the year 2013 behind them: From dropped insurance coverage for millions of Americans to the delay of the law's employer mandate and the problems with HealthCare.gov, 2013 was nothing short of a disaster. There are two things that are important to recognize about Obamacare's difficulties last year:
First, people shouldn't have been surprised that the law was so hard to implement and spawned so much bad press — in fact, it was designed so that the law's more politically unpopular provisions would take effect only after the 2012 elections.