By Evan Newmark
WSJ.com

Note to Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the small army of Wall Street bankers who concocted the AOL-Time Warner merger: get ready to give up the crown. ObamaCare will soon be the worst deal of all time.

Nothing else will ever come close.

In fact, you could take every bad megamerger, the hundreds of destructive Wall Street CDOs and throw in AIG’s entire nuclear credit-default-swap portfolio–and you still wouldn’t have this “deal from hell.”

ObamaCare is divisive. Its objectives aren’t clear. Its numbers don’t add up. And it has a good shot at wrecking both our health-care system and the public treasury by 2020.

But like the very best Wall Street machers who never let a deal die, our elected deal makers in Washington are still fighting to “get it done.” Even the president of the U.S. apparently needs his deal tombstones.

Of course, President Obama will claim that ObamaCare is a good deal for the American taxpayer–that it more than “pays for itself.” And the Congressional Budget Office will back him up with Excel spreadsheets showing how ObamaCare cuts the deficit by $118 billion over the next 10 years.

But ObamaCare is a bad deal made to look good through funny accounting. As New York Times columnist David Brooks recently pointed out there are at least seven massive accounting gimmicks or “dodges” that cover up its true cost.

Of course, big deal makers don’t let the mundane details of accounting get in the way of their big plans. As we now know, it certainly didn’t stop CEO Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers.

So why should it stop the most powerful man in the world? Especially given that the former head of the CBO, Peter Orszag, now works for him in the White House.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) puts the real cost on ObamaCare at $2.3 trillion. That is a lot of money–especially in a country that already has $13 trillion in debt.

It is more than 50 times what the AIG bailout will cost us. It is six times the $400 billion we will end up sinking into Fannie and Freddie. And Ryan’s figure doesn’t even include the havoc ObamaCare’s higher taxes will likely wreak on GDP growth.

Now, some of you may be thinking. The heck with all these numbers–ObamaCare is worth whatever it costs to get 30 million uninsured Americans medical coverage.

And that makes sense. Why do you think deal makers sometimes end up massaging or dismissing a deal’s numbers? They convince themselves that the deal is “strategic”–that it simply must get done.

That is how the board of Time Warner got comfortable with merging with AOL. The future is the Internet. So we have to team up with the future.

Unfortunately, President Obama hasn’t managed to come up a killer “strategic rationale” for ObamaCare–the one simple and clear reason for America to get behind it. Instead, he has offered up so many different rationales that America is just confused.

Is it really possible that ObamaCare will provide every American with health care, “bend the cost curve”, reduce the deficit, accelerate job creation and boost every American’s quality of life?

The majority of Americans don’t think so. Even Obama-booster Warren Buffet has serious doubts about a “bill that really doesn’t attack the cost situation.”

And that is exactly why our political deal makers have put their Washington deal-making machine into overdrive. Deal fatigue can kill a deal–and Americans are getting very fatigued. “The time for talking is over.”

So forget the deal’s lousy economics. Forget that the government is reconfiguring a sixth of our economy. Forget all the infinite unintended consequences of the deal. It is time to just “get it done.”

Perhaps, you still feel some lingering pity for the Time Warner shareholders who endured the last great “deal from hell.”

But, at least Time Warner shareholders could always sell their stock. With ObamaCare, we are all long-term shareholders in the worst deal of all time.