I judge, from Barack Obama’s own unwillingness to offer a robust defense of his plan, which allows a certain number of people to choose to forgo health care, that he’s sorry now he went with it. It’s so much easier just to say “I will give everybody health care.” And he so wishes he could say it. But he went a different way — the only way in which his campaign deviates from down-the-line Democratic orthodoxy — and now he has to stick to it.