David Brooks on Obamacare: Basically, you're reorganizing 17 percent of the U.S. economy, and you're handing a lot of it to a lot of people who can't run a website, and so there's bound to be unintended consequences.

From Shields and Brooks on Friday night's PBS Newhour:

MARK SHIELDS: 

The problems continue. They're compounded and -- by the fact that the president's statement that nobody would have to give up his or her existing insurance, that has been totally contradicted. He was wrong. He was misleading. He was either wrong and ill-informed or he deliberately did it.
And that's -- at a time when you need the president to be the most credible messenger for making the case for people to enroll, to compromise his reputation for candor and honesty is really even further self-inflicted damage.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

How deep a hole are they in over this...

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I think it's a hole that is getting deeper.

I mean, the website was the easy thing to do. And they messed that up. The people who are losing -- are getting their insurance cancellation, that was a necessity of the law. It's sort of offensive because they think they have a good insurance plan. The government regulators are saying, sorry, not good enough. Some of them are going to suffer. Some will benefit.

But these are the foothills to what will be a hole set of bigger problems. Because of the problems with the enrollment right now, that increases the likelihood we will have the death spiral, where only sick people sign up, the healthy don't sign up, and that -- you just can't run a system like that.
Then there are further problems, complexities down the road of the -- how the subsidy -- subsidy mechanism works. That's a very complicated mechanism. Basically, you're reorganizing 17 percent of the U.S. economy, and you're handing a lot of it to a lot of people who can't run a website, and so there's bound to be unintended consequences.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And a lot of these early folks are signing up for Medicaid which doesn't put money into the -- into the health care...

MARK SHIELDS: No. It's certainly not what the insurance companies were looking for. They wanted -- they wanted the young healthy people to sign up.