WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obamacare Round-up: ACA Support in a Death Spiral.

With each passing year, people are becoming warier and warier of Obamacare. WSJ has the results of a new survey on attitudes toward the ACA conducted by Mercer. It found that only 9 percent of companies now believe Obamacare won’t raise their health care costs significantly, compared to 20 percent last year and 25 percent in 2011.

Maybe, just maybe the decline in support has something to do with the information we’ve gotten in recent weeks about the likely costs of insurance under the ACA. It’s becoming clearer every day that the rates on the California exchanges are going to be too high for many Americans, President Obama’s celebratory remarks on California’s lower-than-expected premiums notwithstanding. Even ACA supporters are now saying that the rates are too high. . . .

Declining support for and increased anxiety about the ACA is bad news for the President because it’s self-fulling in a way: the more the public distrusts Obamacare, the less likely it is that people will sign up for insurance—and the more likely in turn that the law will fail. But there’s perhaps an even more immediate problem for the law hitting the news today. Many insurers aren’t signing up to offer plans in the small business exchanges.

It’s almost like it was designed to fail or something.