These are tough times for opponents of health care reform. They bet everything on a debacle, but Obamacare has failed to fail — and their efforts to deny the increasingly obvious success of the law are beginning to look ridiculous.

Oh, and they can’t come up with a conservative alternative; Obamacare IS the conservative alternative, a way to achieve sorta-kinda universal coverage without single payer, and all of its main elements are essential parts of the package.

So what’s left? Claims that guaranteed health insurance is an assault on America’s freedom.

Bill Gardner at The Incidental Economist offers a rather decorous, mild reply to the people making this argument. I’d put it more forcefully: the pre-ACA system drastically restricted many people’s freedom, because given the extreme dysfunctionality of the individual insurance market, they didn’t dare leave jobs (or in some cases marriages) that came with health insurance. Now that affordable insurance is available even if you don’t have a good job at a big company, many Americans will feel liberated — and this hugely outweighs the minor infringement on freedom caused by the requirement that people buy insurance. (Also, if you don’t like the mandate, why not support single payer?)

But no discussion of this latest argument should fail to mention the original insurance-is-slavery campaign — Operation Coffeecup, in which the AMA recruited doctors’ wives to gather their friends and listen to a recording of Ronald Reagan declaring that Medicare would destroy American liberty.

Strange to say, that didn’t happen. And Obamacare won’t turn into a form of slavery, either. On the contrary, as I said, it will be a liberating force for many Americans.