I disagree with that assessment. What will happen, and this is by design, health insurance will be so expensive, cover so little, and be so messed up that people by the score will demand they fix it with single payer.
Don't believe me? Use SS as an example, the government has screwed that up badly, there are no calls for repeal, there are calls to strengthen it and fix it. The only people calling for repeal is a few conservative voices.
As BlueStateSaint said, I think this is different from SS.
In the case of SS it only started to show cracks years after its implementation. Obamacare is different. I wont argue that it was designed to fail, it was, but I dont think it was designed to fail this quickly. The plan was for 5-10 years from now the system to start to fall apart. Right about the time that the taxes and subsidies go 1:1. Keep in mind that the first 6 years of Obamacare are paid for in 10 years of taxes. Then they could come in and "save" us by going to single payer because by that point the insurance industry would be decimated.
Instead we still have an insurance industry that can survive. If Obamcare fails after the insurance industry is decimated then we get single payer, if it fails before that we go back to insurance. Thats why Democrats are desperate to save the law, they just want to get it to a steady limp for about 5 years before pushing for single payer.
And thats partly why I think so many liberals and progressives are freaking out right now. They realize that Obamacare is failing far to early and that this failure is going to push back big government progressivsm by a generation or more. Trust in big government, and government in general, is crashing right now. The double whammy of the Shutdown and then Obamacares failure is making a lot of people question why the government is so big, and that thought terrifies leftists.
SS also was very popular in the polls from the moment it came up, and it got more popular after it went into law.
Obamacare has done the exact opposite. It started out highly unpopular, and it continues to stay unpopular even after it goes into effect.
SS was Bi-Partisan, Obamacare wasnt.
I know its easy to compare, but I really dont think they are similar. There are just to many differences in how they were passed and implemented.
All we can really do is wait though. We all know that Obamacare is failing, the question really is how massive is the failure and what do Americans take away from that? As long as the messaging is "big government=bad" then we will win this fight. If that messaging turns more into "Government will save you!" then its all over.