George Will hits it out of the park today.

First, a mention of 3rd party payments and the inefficiencies that such a system has introduced to our healthcare market (if only he had gone on and said more):

Employer-paid insurance is central to what David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute calls “the 12 cent problem.” That is how much of every health care dollar is spent by the person receiving the care. Hence Americans’ buffet mentality — we paid at the door to the health care feast, so let’s consume all we can.

John McCain had the correct prescription for health care during the 2008 campaign. He proposed serious change — taxing employer-provided health care as what it indisputably is, compensation, and giving tax credits, including refundable ones, for individuals to purchase insurance.

Then, a mention of what is really going on here: Obama really thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and would rather impose a clean solution than deal with the dirt of democracy:

Professor Obama, who will seek re-election on the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said:

“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”

Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at “comprehensive” solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health care system is like a Calder mobile — touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.

So note also Obama’s yearning for something “academically approved” rather than something resulting from “a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people,” aka politics.

Pretty much.

Note that I’m not saying that I don’t think that sometimes the political process isn’t inefficient or that experts can’t come up with the best solution to a problem. What I’m more concerned with is the legitimacy of the process – the principle that our government is representative and based on inviolable sovereignty of the individual. That’s what gets lost so often in the mind of the modern progressive, that he feels he is smarter than everyone else and is being held back by his less enlightened compatriots. THAT is the real cause of the opposition to Obamacare today: a lack of respect for the individual in favor of paternalism.