arises because health insurance is often provided by employers—but I didn’t explicitly ask about it later in the conversation.)

Another group of troublemakers: young people. Low-cost castastrophic insurance is already available, and millions of people who are uninsured could presumably afford it; they just don’t think it’s worth it. That’s why the Affordable Care Act includes an individual mandate to buy health insurance, or else face a penalty. “Look, there are people today who make rational decisions not to purchase health insurance,” said Cruz when I asked about that aspect of things. “Much of that is driven by the price.” In a genuinely competitive market, health care costs would come down, just as the price of LASIK eye surgery has dropped considerably since the technique was first introduced; because people generally pay for LASIK out of pocket, that is, doctors have an incentive to compete for their business by offering lower prices. Extending that thinking, he continued: if the market for health care services was a genuine market, which it currently isn’t, there would be competitive pressure on insurers to lower the cost of their policies, so that young adults would sign up. Hard saying not knowing, of course.

Still, whether or not you prefer Cruz’s approach to Obama’s, I would say he’s hardly out of line in offering this line of critique. The Affordable Care Act has always been controversial , and the road to implementation has, obviously, been rocky. The bill was sold with the promise that people would be able to keep their extant health insurance if they were happy with it, which is proving not to be true for some of them. (In his 2010 State of the Union address , in fact, Obama referred to that as a “right”, which was probably overstating the case.) Projections about the number of people who still won’t have insurance after the ACA is implemented have crept up: the independent analysts at the Congressional Budget Office expect there to be 31 million people left uninsured in the country , compared to 30 million in their previous projection. Business owners have warned that the law is constraining their ability to operate and willingness to expand, which isn’t good for workers. Plenty of people take that complaint seriously—including, significantly, the Obama administration itself. “We are listening,” wrote White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett in June , announcing that the administration would give businesses “more time to comply” with the law’s provision that employers with more than fifty employees have to provide health insurance.

Cruz is, in other words, making some valid points about Obamacare. Some of his objections are the same ones that Congressional Republicans had before the bill was passed, and that's a fight that they lost—so even though Cruz hadn't been elected to the Senate at that point, it is a little odd to try to retroactively filibuster the legislation. His primary critiques, though, are about what has happened since the law was signed and since the Supreme Court upheld it, and it would be disingenuous for Democrats to say that the road to implementation has been no more difficult than expected. At the same time, Democrats can still argue that the Affordable Care Act is a worthwhile reform. There are almost sixty million people in the country without any health insurance at all, and the Affordable Care Act is the only reform available in the next few months. Democrats should, in fact, argue that. They won’t necessarily be right, but it would be more respectable than attacking Cruz for pointing out some of the consequences of a massive, expensive, and far-reaching law.