Megan McArdle offers several ideas for cheaper, simpler health care alternatives in her article, A Cheaper, Simpler Obamacare Plan, while pointing out that passing any of these alternatives is unlikely because it is not “what progressives wanted”. Frankly I do know what progressives want anymore. They were successful at confusing the American people with the details of the Affordable Care Act and may still be successful at confusing law makers and the courts on the question of subsidies. All of this deception implies that progressives favor a “make it up as we go approach” to health care reform. It is safe to say that approach did not work. If deception about wealth redistribution is all the progressives are bringing to the table I think we can safely return to the old political process and let the states resume their rightful place as the engine of health care reform. Wealth redistribution is just a shell game in health care reform. If you wanted health care to be affordable then Massachusetts was the wrong state to model a national plan after. Maybe this time a state with a greater interest in health care that is truly affordable will adopt a variation of one Megan’s ideas but the Affordable Care Act experiment is dead. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”