Oh, so I see how this is going to go. Health care reform makes substantial, measurable progress, and its opponents respond by redefining success. Or to use a football analogy, we’re driving the ball down the field, and the likes of Darcie Johnston are moving the goalposts.

The latest bit of good news — couched by our media, as always, in references to the “trouble-plagued” Vermont Health Connect system — came on Monday, when state officials announced that nearly 75% of small-business employees are already enrolled in a VHC insurance plan. And Health Care Access Commissioner Mark Larson says the state is on track to ensure that no one suffers a lapse in coverage on January 1.

Wait, wait — I thought small businesses were the failure point of Shummycare, with business owners swamped in confusion and employees threatened with lapses in coverage. And now you’re telling me that the vast majority are already good to go?

There is a caveat. A lot of small businesses opted to deal directly with insurers, rather than enrolling online through VHC.

But the bigger point is, health care reform is working. Small businesses may not have used the website — but they’ve chosen insurance plans that are defined and regulated by the state. Those plans aren’t riddled with exclusions and high deductibles. Pre-existing conditions are covered! That’s the real substance of reform. The website is simply a tool. A tool that didn’t initially work as it should, and is now being fixed.  

The response of reform opponents, natch, is to redefine failure.

Randy Brock, after his initial (and highly touted) judgment that “the system doesn’t work,” has apparently shut his piehole on the subject*. Good ol’ Darcie “Hack” Johnston, on the other hand, can still be relied upon to issue strident statements every damn time.

*Which might be a hint that he’s abandoned any thought of a second run for Governor in 2014.

She’s just as strident these days, but the substance keeps getting thinner:

”The best thing that Vermont Health Connect did was they got out of the way. Remember, businesses wouldn’t have been in this mess if it hadn’t been for their spectacular failure,” she said. ”They’ve still forced businesses to make decision and choices that may or may not be what they wanted to do and may or may not be the best for their business or their employees.”

Aha. She can no longer claim that the system is doomed to collapse, or that thousands of Vermonters will be stripped of coverage; now, her definition of failure is that businesses have been forced to make decisions “that may or may not be what they wanted to do.”

Well, exCUUUUUUUSE MEEEE!

Don’t we all, every single day, have to do things that “may or may not be what [we] wanted to do”? I have to wear a sweater because it’s cold. I have to carry the firewood. I have to wait for the traffic light to change. I have to pay my phone bill. I have to pay my taxes, in support of a civil and fair society. And some of us have had to choose a health plan that might not have been exactly what we “wanted to do.”  

(Hell, under the old “system” a lot of us had to settle for overpriced, lousy health insurance — or go without. Even if it wasn’t what we “wanted to do.”)

Johnston’s predictions of disaster continue to recede into the future as well. Earlier this fall, she said that Vermonters were being “forced off a cliff” and would suffer “irreparable harm.” As recently as last week, she was predicting large numbers of people would suffer lapses in coverage on January 1. Well, now she’s retreated to April 1, when she warns that “the state will see a spike in the rate of uninsured Vermonters” because “these are not affordable plans.”

Okay, so now if anyone is either inconvenienced, or has to pay more for insurance because they can’t buy super-crappy high-deductible exclusion-ridden plans anymore, then health care reform will have been a failure. In spite of the fact that many more Vermonters will be insured than before, that all insurance plans will at least be halfway decent, and there will be some prospect of controlling runaway costs.

Hey, if that’s a “failure,” I want more.

p.s. I also look forward to how Paul “The Huntsman” Heintz will manage to declare reform a “loser” or Johnston a “winner” in his weekly “Winners and Losers” column, as he’s been doing every damn week. Maybe someday he’ll actually declare Johnston or Brock “losers” for their inaccurate, overblown predictions of doom.