Of particular interest is the fact that the Obama administration, not its opponents, is gutting the individual mandate. After all, the administration has argued that the mandate is absolutely essential to ObamaCare’s success, as indeed it is. With insurers forced to cover those with costly pre-existing conditions at below-market rates, a large number of young and healthy people must be forced to purchase insurance at above-market rates to keep the system afloat. Without the individual mandate, the ACA’s other provisions will “make matters worse, not better,” Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the Supreme Court in 2012.

“The suspension of the mandate,” wrote New York Post columnist Mark Cunningham, “means the administration has quietly given up on making the thing [ObamaCare] work.”

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The less that ObamaCare is enforced, the better, generally speaking. But removing some parts and not others makes the law even less sustainable than it already was, which could lead to repeal but could also provide the impetus for a fully nationalized, single-payer healthcare system. ObamaCare opponents will need to remind others continually that the ACA, not (for the most part) doctors, hospitals, and insurers, is the cause of their healthcare woes and that the solution is not to treat the symptoms but to excise the underlying disease.

FK – Which is probably what they intended from the beginning.