President Barack Obama’s announced intention is to bring “quality, affordable,” health insurance to the uninsured. That is not likely to happen for some time, if at all, given the debacle of the rollout. But Obamacare has already succeeded in taking away health insurance from some 19 million people in the individual market. Those people purchased the health insurance they believed best met their needs. It was what they wanted and in many cases, including that of this writer, they were happy with their health plan and wanted to keep it.

President Barack Obama told the nation multiple times that “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period.” The New York Times calls this an “incorrect promise,” but to all but the willfully blind it is a lie. Millions of others are happy with the employer-provided coverage they now stand to lose. So the law is first and foremost a taking, an example of what we might call Obamarxism: From each, the health plan he already had; to each, a more expensive plan with things he doesn’t need or want.

It also violates the principle precept of medical ethics: primum non nocere or “first do no harm,” also known as non-maleficience. Faced with a health-related problem, in other words, better not to do something that will cause more harm than good. Obamacare certainly does that. As one observer noted, the law is based on mendacity, paternalism and subterfuge, but there’s more to it.

As Mark Twain said, the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. Obamacare is evidence of that because legislators passed this law without reading it. So it might as well have been passed by illiterates and looks very much like it was, a sterling example of unintelligent design. Here we have a bad idea, administered by incompetent bureaucrats through a dysfunctional and insecure website, and abetted by “navigators” who could well be convicted felons. All told, Obamacare is perhaps the greatest example of government abuse, waste, and fraud in recent history.