There’s the old adage that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. A twist on that is a liberal is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. That is, even those who are victims of measures that they support are so stuck on their ideology that they keep supporting those same measures.

A recent WSJ article (“Health Law Pinches Colleges”) describes colleges and universities that are cutting back on the hours of their adjunct professors in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance coverage under Obamacare. The article points to a professor whose hours are being cut, resulting in a salary cut of $2,000. The professor said in response, ”I think it goes against the spirit of the [health-care] law,” Mr. Balla said. “In education, we’re working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.”

That sounds like somebody who was a big supporter of Obamacare. And I bet that person is still a big supporter of Obamacare. He seems upset with his employer for not abiding by the spirit of Obamacare. He probably doesn’t realize that his employer, also probably run by Obamacare supporters (given that it’s a college), just cannot afford to abide by that spirit and has no other choice but to cut his hours. The alternative would be to resort to more drastic measures like laying people off.

I bet lots of Obamacare supporters who’ve been victims of Obamacare are thinking in the back of their mind, “I’m a sacrificial lamb for the public good; there must be a greater good in Obamacare despite being personally negatively affected.”

Little do they realize there are millions of sacrificial lambs all across the nation. So many such lambs mean that Obamacare is not a public good, but a public bad.

When America embarks on a disastrous policy, as it did last night during the Sunday Night Massacre, when the House voted to pass Obamacare, I think to myself if there’s any little thing I could have done to help stop it. I did write a couple of anti-Obamacare articles. But they were probably read by a few hundred, or if I’m lucky a few thousand people, or about .0001 percent of the population of America. So that didn’t help at all.

But this morning in the shower (where a lot of my ideas come to me, in addition to jogging) I was kicking myself for not trying another strategy. Had I been more astute, it’s something I should have done, in retrospect. To be sure, I’m absolutely sure that it still wouldn’t have changed anything whatsoever, but at least I would have given it my best shot.

In previous weeks I had been toying with researching and writing an article on the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring method. When the CBO determines a certain policy’s effect on the deficit, it doesn’t take the political feasibility of that policy into account. So if Congress says it’s going to raise taxes and cut spending by a certain amount, the CBO uses that amount in its calculations and doesn’t make a judgment regarding how likely those tax increases and spending cuts will come to fruition.

That was the case with Obamacare. Last week the CBO stated that based on Congress’s numbers, Obamacare would cut the deficit due to the massive tax increases and cuts to Medicare payments to doctors. That gave a big shot in the arm to Obamacare supporters in the House, prompting them to call for a vote on Sunday.

But it’s so ludicrous because the reductions in payments to doctors are highly unlikely to happen, based on past experience, and additional government revenues from tax increases will likely be much less than anticipated, also based on past experience (because when taxes go up, people’s behavior changes, prompting them to work less, find tax loopholes, or defer paying taxes).

I should have written an article about that. In addition the the article itself, I would have had a lot more knowledge about the subject under my belt. That would have equipped me to be quite conversant on the topic.

And then I could have approached Doug Elmendorf on the subject. He’s the director of the Congressional Budget Office.

For the past decade or more I’ve been going off and on to a group called the Prosperity Caucus, where a modest-sized group of free-market types meet once a month to hear a speaker. (Anyone can go – you certainly don’t need an exclusive invitation or anything like that.) And they’re usually quite prominent people in the policy world.

Last month, Doug Elmendorf was the speaker. That could have been a great opportunity, during the Q&A, to suggest to him, nay plead with him, that the CBO should report back with two or more sets of numbers, assigning the likelihood of each set. (The Obamacare deficit reduction number certainly would get an “unlikely” scoring. A soaring deficit number, contrary to Obamacare pipe dreams, would have gotten a “likely” scoring.)

After his talk, when everyone was milling about, he surprisingly stayed for quite a long time, willing to take questions and comments from people individually. That would have been a great opportunity for me to hand him my (would-be) article and reiterate to him that the CBO really should take political feasibility into account.

Of course, I’m not so naive as to think that had I done that, it actually would have changed anything at CBO. (For all I know it may require an act of Congress.) But at least my conscience would have been clear.

Opportunity missed. Probably never again will I ever have such close access to such a key figure in the policy world just before such an America-shattering vote.

If Scott Brown’s senatorial win in Massachusetts ends up derailing Obamacare, then it’s time for Republicans to push for healthcare reform with just as much enthusiasm as Democrats pushed (and are pushing) for healthcare deform.

Healthcare reform would genuinely substantially lower healthcare costs (and not through price controls, as would happen under deform), resulting in far fewer uninsured.

The key planks of healthcare reform should be: (1) ending the institution of getting one’s health insurance through one’s employer, yet (2) instituting mandatory medical savings accounts (MSAs) through one’s employer (the two are not contradictory), (3) promoting high-deductable insurance combined with MSAs, and (4) health insurance deregulation in order to further bring down costs.

For details, click here.

If under Obamacare you can keep your existing health insurance plan, as the president repeatedly declares, how can you do so if there’s no more insurance plan to keep?

When President Obama says you can keep your insurance plan, what he means is that you’ll merely be allowed to do so assuming you still have access to it. He doesn’t guarantee that you’ll still have access to it. In fact, Obamacare ensures that there’s a good chance you won’t.

Why? One reason is because employers will have to pay a payroll tax if they don’t offer health insurance. Given the choice between paying thousands of dollars per employee for health insurance, or the less-expensive payroll tax (up to 8 percent of salary under the House bill, and a flat $750 under the Senate version), in this cut-throat business world, many employers will no doubt opt for the less-expensive tax. And the employees can kiss their health insurance plan goodbye.

Another reason is new mandates on insurance companies that will drive many of them out of business. Notable is the requirement to provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions – even to people who wait to buy coverage until after they’re sick or injured.

Why pay into an insurance plan at all if you’ll be eligible for the benefits regardless? People will stop paying in droves, so insurance companies’ revenue will plummet. Meanwhile the companies’ expenses will skyrocket because claims will skyrocket. When expenses consistently exceed revenue, they’ll go out of business. That’s what happened to insurance companies located in states that had a similar mandate, and it’s what will happen to insurance companies nationwide if that mandate succeeds. Insurance companies will cease to exist in droves (which of course is the ultimate objective of many if not most Obamacare supporters).

People will say, “Hey Mr. President, you told me I could keep my insurance plan. But because of you, I don’t have one to keep.”