[WS:] I think he is reading way too much into it. Obamacare is a poorly debugged hodgepodge of stop gap measures aiming to slow down the runaway medical inflation. However, it tackles only the insurance cost, which if I recall properly, accounts for less then 10 percent of the total healthcare cost. It does precious little to address the main part of that cost - doctor and hospital charges, and the prices of medications. It is essentially a bandaid on a grave wound - it may slow down the hemorrhage for a while but it will not cure the wound. The only way to fix the problem is to control the prices of health services i.e. how much hospitals, doctors and big pharma can charge. This basically means the nationalization of health care itself - not just nationalization of health insurance - and that ain't gonna happen any time soon.
I sincerely doubt it will become a model for social security for two reasons. First, in all likelihood, it will be judged a complete fiasco in just a few years as we will be facing the problem of the runaway medical inflation. Second, Obamacare was a result of a political impasse inside the beltway - a minimally tolerable solution to a serious problem with the intent to keep the status quo as much as possible rather than to change it in a radical way, a mountain giving birth to a mouse, and a rather sickly one.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."