The scary part of the massive failure of the initial Obamacare rollout is that this disaster has nothing to do with Obamacare; this scenario is too often the new government standard for simply everything – overpriced, underperforming and completely unaccountable.
For the better part of $200 million in public funds, you would expect a functional website if you even hoped to manage the nation’s healthcare market. Did Health & Human Services (HHS) even test it somewhere other than at a White House demonstration for bundling donors? The policy wonks cynically claimed they knew exactly how to do this and it turned out they were not only blowhards, all they were blowing was smoke.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was never designed to perform or deliver a single medical procedure; thank goodness, that remains the function of the health professionals – doctors, hospitals, and clinics, etc. The ACA had just two functions – manipulate the market and control the finances. To do that without the usual backstop of an army of government employees, whose own retirement and healthcare costs alone would sink the ship, the government had to go the Internet route. You see that army of workers would never accept the same ACA healthcare plans you are going to be stuck with.
The job of HHS should have been relatively easy with 76,300 employees and a total 2013 budget authority of $932 billion (up 2,600 employees and $49 billion from 2011). At least 85 percent of that is for healthcare and they are now asking for an added $65 billion in 2014. However, HHS failed and we will now throw more money at it and no one will be fired. Why should they? We can always conjure up billions more electronically, as the Fed does not even bother with the printing presses anymore. If someone were canned, they would soon have a lobbying job schmoozing because the concept of failure has fallen out favor. Access is everything when the government shells it out in the “here is another billion dollars” sweepstakes.
Oh, Obamacare has its unique problems including the president’s in-your-face lies about keeping your current healthcare plan, staggering price increases for some, and claims that it will reduce the overall cost without even mentioning rationing or the accompanying tax increases.
Neither side actually cares about the people – only the next election; they are already trying to figure out the winner-loser balance between the Republican government shutdown and the Democrats’ flop-sweat of an ACA Internet crash and an administration looking more like all Three Stooges rolled together every day.
Newsflash for politicians, the billions and trillions you throw away was hard earned, put there by the work of the American people. The reason you can tax us is that we got up every day and went to work, many of us for half a century or more, and we sent you a slice of the pie we earned. How about at least treating that money with the respect it deserves?
The old mantra was, “Do you know what you get if you do a good job? “You get to keep it.” No more, now if you do a bad job you get a new contract to fix your mistakes, and the department head gets kudos for eventually surviving the disasters they helped create. Meaningless apologies are how the software industry handles their lousy work, the government should do better – heads from high up should roll over this fiasco.
The problem is not Obamacare; it’s the whole thing.
