Admittedly and proudly cherry picking this time from your article for effect

Of course, success stories from Social Security to Medicare prescription drugs represent the survivors — not the failures.

One that completely blew up is the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which had broad bipartisan support when it was enacted in 1988 and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

Intended to provide new medical benefits for the elderly, including expanded payments for nursing homecare, the program also imposed staggering new costs on those it sought to help — an extra monthly Medicare premium and a surtax for people over 65 with incomes above $35,000. The law was repealed a year after its passage, after angry seniors launched nationwide protests.

I am kind of puzzled why I keep seeing many versions of this story (that Medicare and Social Security had tough starts, too) done over and over and over since early October. What is the point of continually repeating it? To say "stop your complaining"? How is the described process of improving problematic systems after rollout supposed to happen if we are supposed to stop pointing out the problems?

What I see is anti-Obamacare and pro-Obamacare ideologues trying to continue a political fight that they can't admit is over! Both please stop your agitprop, let's move on to problems, complaints and agitating for fixes. And the last thing I want to hear from the people that are running this program is spin about how wonderful it is, much less spending lots of money on spin promotion.

It is for the users to decide how wonderfully they are executing this program. (And that is the stage we are at: execution, the one after  the"get out and sell this program" stage.) Good word of mouth takes care of itself, needs no agitprop. That means a little bit more of "the customer is always right" If there is expectation of good results beyond those of the Medicaid expansion winners getting free or very low cost coverage, seems there's a lot more work to do, with complaints not just unmuzzled but addressed.